UK lagging behind in cutting sepsis deaths

DEATH rates from sepsis in Britain are five times worse than in the best performing country in Europe, a study suggests.

While the UK has made some progress in reducing sepsis death rates, declines were not as pronounced as those in other nations.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Imperial College London conducted an analysis of 30-year trends in sepsis deaths using the World Health Organisation’s mortality database.

Between 1985 and 2015, sepsis death rates in the UK fell from 40 out of every 100,000 women to 35 deaths per 100,000. For men the rate fell from 49 per 100,000 in 1985 to 40 per 100,000 in 2015.

But in Finland the death rate for women fell from 32 per 100,000 women in 1987 to 6.5 per 100,000 in 2014. For men it dipped from 51 per 100,000 to ten per 100,000 in the same period. The figures will be presented to an intensive care conference in Paris today.

It comes as scientists revealed a new sepsis test that is 1,000 times more sensitive than conventional screening methods.

Experts from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York have developed the first diagnostic platform that screens for all known bacterial infections, as well as markers for antibiotic resistance.

A study, published in the journal mBio, claims the BacCapSeq platform provides results in 70 hours.

The Daily Mail has been campaigning to raise awareness of sepsis.