Dangerous places
Hospitals are dangerous places and after reading the results of a study that was published in the journal Plos Medicine you may want to think twice about going there. The study found that 91,000 people die every year in European hospitals from infections they caught in those hospitals. The number of patients that gets infected is estimated to be 2, 6 million.
Maybe that makes the death rate acceptable (3.5 percent), but the absolute number remains rather stunning.
Most of the infections are pneumonia, blood poisoning, and infections to the urinal tract or to wounds.
Petra Gastmeier, an expert from Berlin, said that the study is the best of its kind she has ever seen, adding that it matches her suspicions about the issue. Gastmeier said that one third of these fatal infections are preventable through better hygiene.
The Italian Alessandro Cassini of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control led the research team. He used data collected in 2011 and 2012 in thirty countries that have a combined number of 510 million inhabitants.