What is sepsis and how can you spot the symptoms?
Every 3.5 seconds someone in the world dies of sepsis - a form of blood poisoning which kills three times more people than breast cancer per year. But what is it, and how can you spot the symptoms?
Sepsis is when the body starts to fight an infection, it can trigger the immune system to go into overdrive, damaging the body's own tissues and organs.
Untreated, sepsis leads to multiple organ failure and death.
Symptoms include a rapid heart rate, difficulty breathing, low blood pressure, a change in behaviour (confusion, drowsiness or slurring words - patients can appear drunk), hypothermia, diarrhoea, changes in skin colour, sore throats and flu-like symptoms.
If diagnosed and treated in the first hour the patient has more than an 80% survival rate.
In the UK, it is estimated that we see 102,000 cases of severe sepsis every year, with a staggering 37,000 deaths. In comparison, breast cancer claims around 12,000 lives each year.
Sepsis is one of the biggest direct causes of death in pregnancy in the UK.
It consumes over a third of our most expensive hospital beds in Intensive Care and costs the NHS around £2.5 billion a year.
Every hour, about 1000 people die from sepsis worldwide.
A UK Sepsis Trust awareness poll in 2014 found that 40% of the public had heard the word sepsis but of those, only 40% knew it was a medical emergency.
Source: UK Sepsis Trust