If you go into your local hospital, you should be wary: visiting could be deadly, especially if you are a patient. You could possibly become one of the one out of every 20 hospital visitors in America who contracts a disease as a result or one of the 90,000 hospital visitors annually who contracts a disease that kills them.
In fact, according to the website, www.newsmatch.com, a hospital visit is one of the leading causes of death. Actually, hospital visits lead to more annual deaths than those caused by AIDS, vehicle accidents, and breast cancer. According to the website, the medical establishment does not want the public to know the dangers of hospital visits. Hospital visits, according to the website of the American Association for Retired People (AARP), www.aarp.or, are the eighth leading cause of death in America.
Dr. Russell Blaylock, a respected neurosurgeon, according to the newsmatch website, offered techniques for hospital visitors to protect themselves from catching a deadly disease during their visit. Dr. Blaylock a hospital visit represents numerous hazards.
According to Dr. Blaylock, the reason a visit to a local hospital can be deadly is that hospitals are a breeding ground for “countless infectious organisms” that can make one sick. Some can even be deadly.
According to the website, Dr. Blaylock does not always express an opinion that is welcomed by most in the medical community. The doctor, according to the website, however, is nationally recognized, a board-certified neurosurgeon, a health practitioner, and an author and lecturer. He has 26 years of experience in neurosurgery and is editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons and Journal of the American Nutriceutical Association. His other experience includes serving previously as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, MS. He is currently a visiting professor of Biology at the Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi. He receives no funding from the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Blaylock says there are a variety of steps Americans can take to protect themselves during their hospital stay. His report is available to obtain online. It reveals many things including what to eat before and during a hospital stay and how to avoid the two most common and deadly hospital-acquired infections.
According to the AARP website, hospitals are working harder to stop infections. The problem is bugs are increasingly resistant to antibiotics. A total of 20 million people get a hospital-acquired infection annually. In 2005 19,000 people received an infection alone, compared to 11,600 the previous year. To top it off, 13 percent of the people who received the infections in Pennsylvania died, compared to only 2 percent of those who did not receive an infection.
According to the AARP website, a New Hampshire resident, who was operated on so cancer could be removed from a lung, died. The death was not from the disease but because of a germ she contracted in the hospital. Her daughters then appeared before the legislature and became a part of the nationwide movement against infections in hospitals that can be deadly.
Betsy McCaughey, the former Lieutenant Governor of New York, is a leader in the movement. The former Lieutenant Governor founded a nonprofit committee, the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, after a man who was mugged but survived brain trauma, obtained an infection in a hospital and died.
McCaughey simple steps could be taken to prevent the spread of deadly infections in local hospitals, like telling patients to shower with chlorhexidine soap if they will have surgery. Such soap can be obtained in a drugstore.
McCaughey hospitals are content if they have only one wound for every 24 surgical patients. She stated if the hospitals were more careful, that one wound would not be necessary. A full 25% of those wound cases require a catheter for a week or more.
According to the AARP website, if hospitals were more diligent to always give patients antibiotics before surgery, avoid the overuse of catheters and intravenous lines, and see their health care workers always wash their hands, infections would be cut dramatically.
McCaughey points out that bacteria are spread “through touch.” She added that at one time, doctors were trained not to touch “doorknobs, cabinets, curtains, and blood pressure cuffs,” once they had scrubbed and were wearing gloves. She that now a “liberal use of antibiotics” has replaced attention to “rigorous hygiene.” She added the trend started in the 1970′s.
In 1974 only two percent of staph germs were drug-resistant, but now 63 percent are.
Some hospitals are working hard to solve the problem. Some hospital workers are being trained to wash their hands. They are being trained to more closely monitor incision sites and to raise beds at least 30 degrees, to prevent fluid from going into lungs. In one city with such training, Cambridge, Massachusetts, there have been no cases of someone contracting an infection at a local hospital for a year.
While Pennyslvania and California are two that have been leading the way on working to solve the problem of deadly infections in hospitals, 14 have passed laws requiring hospitals to report information on infections to the public.
Pittsburgh’s Alleghany Hospital has saved $1.2 million over two years by reducing the rate of infections from large-vein catheters by 90 percent and ventilator pneumonias by 85 percent.
Deadly infections in hospitals have been a major problem in America. There are many hospitals and others working to overcome the problem. It never hurts to be educated, however, if you are going to be a patient, or are going to visit a hospital patient.
