The Disease Killer Nobody Seems to Talk About

You’ve heard lots about the big diseases that can kill you. Cancer. Heart disease. Alzheimer’s. Diabetes. They regularly make national, if not world-wide, news. People talk about them every day.

They kill a lot of people. They should be talked about. A lot.

Yet there is another problem that 1.7 million adults in the US contract annually. It kills about 350,000 of them. It is the 3rd leading cause of death in US hospitals. Globally it kills about 11 million people each year. Although the death toll seems to be decreasing, the number of cases seems to be increasing.

It’s called Sepsis. I had actually never heard about it until I started working in assisted living. One of our residents had to go to the hospital due to a fall. At the hospital, they contracted pneumonia. Then sepsis. Then they died.

I then talked to a Hospice nurse who told me this happens a lot. She told me it’s pretty common to see a broken hip lead to death by pneumonia or sepsis in the hospital.

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition that occurs when the body’s immune system overreacts to an infection. The overreaction leads to widespread inflammation throughout the body and damage to multiple organs. Eventually you go into septic shock as your organs become too damaged, your blood pressure drops too low, and you die.

Sounds awful.

Sounds weird too. Why would your body’s immune system overreact to an infection? Seems like there would be more to the story than ‘it just happened’. All of us have infections on a regular basis. Our bodies handle them just fine. Then out of the blue everything blows up?

I thought maybe it’s because elderly people’s immune systems are failing them, like other parts of their bodies. Yet sepsis can happen to younger people as well. In fact a form of sepsis called puerperal sepsis was killing a lot of pregnant women in the 19th century until a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis figured out what was wrong. Doctors needed to wash their hands before delivering babies.

Once this simple intervention occurred, deaths from sepsis dropped dramatically.

Another characteristic I found out about sepsis is that people with sepsis experience dramatic drops in the levels of certain vitamins such as vitamin C, vitamin D, l-carnitine, selenium and vitamin B1. Were they drops or insufficiencies before sepsis took over? Or both?

Yet the mainstream treatment for sepsis is antibiotics and lots of fluids. If the problem becomes very bad, the doctors have options such as supplemental oxygen, mechanical ventilation, insulin therapy, dialysis and surgical intervention.

I get the idea that if sepsis is caused by the reaction to an infection, antibiotics will help with the infection. But none of the treatments seem to address why your immune system went haywire.

The body needs vitamins to function. Wouldn’t it make sense to check and replenish those vitamins when someone does go to the hospital? Especially with an infection? And wouldn’t it make sense to serve food in the hospital that helps boost those vitamin and mineral levels?

Instead when I visit a resident in the hospital I see cans of soda by their beds and tons of processed foods being served. Call me crazy but I think there’s a connection.