About 1 in 25 patients, or 4 percent, developed a hospital-acquired infection while seeking medical treatment in 2011, according to a study.
The research, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, said patients contracted about 721,800 infections at hospitals that year, and that 75,000 of the cases were fatal, added the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Pneumonia and surgical-site infections were the most common types, each accounting for 22 percent of the total infections that year. That means that almost half of those infections were either linked to a device attached to the patient or was the result of a surgical procedure, a Reuters report commented. Gastrointestinal and urinary tract infections, and infections of the bloodstream were also common.
"There's no accountability for a hospital that has very high infection rates, and my sense is, there absolutely needs to be," said Dr. Peter Pronovost, director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins, according to CNN.
In 2002, there were an estimated 1.7 million hospital-associated infections, but in terms of reducing these rates, "there's great data showing that we can actually move the needle significantly," said Dr. Michael Bell, director of the CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.
The new study, led by Dr. Shelley S. Magill of the CDC, surveyed 11,282 patients treated at 183 hospitals in 10 states between May and September 2011. Pneumonia and infections at a surgical site were popularly seen at that time, followed by stomach or intestinal illnesses, which made up 17 percent of cases. Urinary tract and bloodstream infections ranked fourth and fifth, respectively.
The new report "validates the work we've been doing, focusing on some of the severe infections related to intensive care, related to devices such as catheters in the bloodstream or the bladder, mechanical ventilation or surgical procedures," Bell told Reuters.
"But at the same time, we're not doing a perfect job of doing everything we should, every single time," Bell added, "and there's some things which we haven't figured out how best to manage -- yet."
