(Sarah Boseley/ The Guardian) — Deaths from sepsis around the world are twice as high as previously thought, with babies and small children in poorer countries at greatest risk, a major study has revealed.
There were almost 50m sepsis cases worldwide and 11m deaths in 2017, according to US researchers writing in the Lancet medical journal. Sepsis, an overcharged response by the body to infection, is associated with one in five deaths worldwide, they say. By comparison, the World Health Organisation estimated that there were 9.6 million deaths from cancer in 2018.
The new estimates come from an analysis of data in the Global Burden of Disease study run by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. The leap in numbers comes from an attempt to quantify what is happening in low- and middle-income countries, where there is little data and children are worst affected. “More than half of all sepsis cases worldwide in 2017 occurred among children,” says the paper. Nearly 3 million died; many were under a month old. (…)