[BITList] US - Best healthcare system in the world

[CT's]

isn't it great.................................................?

[place is bloody filthy]

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Hospital Infections Kill 48,000 Each Year
Study Shows Hospital-Acquired Infections Kill 3 Times as Many Americans as HIV
By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
Feb. 22, 2010 - Every year, 48,000 Americans die of infections they caught while in the hospital -- and that's a conservative estimate, a new study finds.

These aren't infections people would have caught anyway. They are mistakes that cost lives, says study researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, PhD, MPH, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C. think tank Resources for the Future.

"It is a staggering number and one that does not have to be," Laxminarayan tells WebMD. "When a patient goes to the hospital for another illness and dies of pneumonia, it does not always occur to the family that it was a mistake. But if that same patient went to the hospital and got blood tainted with HIV, the response would be quite different."

Hospital acquired infections actually kill three times more Americans than HIV does. Yet we're only beginning to get a handle on the size of the problem. That's because it's been very hard to separate out the costs -- in terms of lives, suffering, and money -- from the suffering caused by the illnesses and injuries that land people in the hospital in the first place.

Laxminarayan and colleagues analyzed administrative data from a huge national database of information on hospital records for 69 million U.S. residents in 40 states between 1998 and 2006. They focused only on infections acquired in the hospital, and not on infections picked up in the community.
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