Author Interviews, CDC, Infections / 10.09.2025
CDC Releases Progress and Opportunities from Sepsis Core Elements Program
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Kristina Betz MD, PhD
Measure Development and Validation Unit Lead, NHSN
Surveillance Branch
Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
MedicalResearch.com: Would you briefly explain what is meant by sepsis?
i.e., how common is it, how serious, what are the major causes?
Response: Sepsis is a life-threatening medical emergency that happens when the body’s response to an infection causes vital organs to stop working properly. Sepsis is often caused by bacteria, but it can also happen because of other infections, like viruses such as COVID-19.
Sepsis is one of the main reasons people go to the hospital and can be very dangerous. In the United States, about 1.7 million adults go to the hospital each year because of sepsis. Sadly, about 350,000 of these people die in the hospital or are sent to hospice care.
Even if people survive sepsis, it can cause long-lasting problems. They might have new health issues, not be able to go back to work, need to go back to the hospital, or even die later on.
Source: Hospital Sepsis Program Core Elements | Sepsis | CDC, What Is Sepsis | Sepsis Alliance
Kristina Betz MD, PhD
Measure Development and Validation Unit Lead, NHSN
Surveillance Branch
Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
MedicalResearch.com: Would you briefly explain what is meant by sepsis?
i.e., how common is it, how serious, what are the major causes?
Response: Sepsis is a life-threatening medical emergency that happens when the body’s response to an infection causes vital organs to stop working properly. Sepsis is often caused by bacteria, but it can also happen because of other infections, like viruses such as COVID-19.
Sepsis is one of the main reasons people go to the hospital and can be very dangerous. In the United States, about 1.7 million adults go to the hospital each year because of sepsis. Sadly, about 350,000 of these people die in the hospital or are sent to hospice care.
Even if people survive sepsis, it can cause long-lasting problems. They might have new health issues, not be able to go back to work, need to go back to the hospital, or even die later on.
Source: Hospital Sepsis Program Core Elements | Sepsis | CDC, What Is Sepsis | Sepsis Alliance
Dr. Roca[/caption]
Anna Roca PhD
MRC Unit The Gambia at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Fajara, The Gambia
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Context specific interventions are needed to decrease the high burden of severe neonatal morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. Severe bacterial infections are a main cause of neonatal mortality in the continent. Oral intra-partum azithromycin is a cheap intervention easily scalable. Before embarking on this trial, we conducted a proof-of-concept trial that showed the intervention reduced maternal and neonatal bacterial carriage of the most prevalent bacteria causing neonatal sepsis in the continent.
Dr. Rhee[/caption]
Chanu Rhee, MD,MPH
Assistant Professor of Population Medicine
Harvard Medical School / Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute
Assistant Hospital Epidemiologist
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Sepsis is the body’s reaction to a serious infection that results a cascade of inflammation in the body and organ dysfunction, such as low blood pressure, confusion, or failure of the lungs, kidneys, or liver. Sepsis is a major cause of death, disability, and cost in the U.S. and around the world. Growing recognition of this problem has led to numerous sepsis performance improvement initiatives in hospitals around the country. Some of these efforts have also been catalyzed by high-profile tragic cases of missed sepsis leading to death, which may have contributed to a perception that most sepsis deaths are preventable if doctors and hospitals were only better at recognizing it.
However, the extent to which sepsis-related deaths might be preventable with better hospital-based care is unknown. In my own experience as a critical care physician, a lot of sepsis patients we treat are extremely sick and even when they receive timely and optimal medical care, many do not survive. This led myself and my colleagues to conduct this study to better understand what types of patients are dying from sepsis and how preventable these deaths might be. 
Dr. McHugh[/caption]
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Leo McHugh, Ph.D.
Director, Bioinformatics
Immunexpress
Seattle, Washington
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. McHugh: Sepsis is the leading cause of child mortality in the world, and in developing countries kills more adults than breast cancer, prostate cancer and HIV combined. Approximately 30% of people admitted to ICU have sepsis, and up to 50% of these patients die. It’s a major cost burden also, costing the US health system $17 billion per year. The best way to reduce costs and improve patient outcomes is to detect sepsis early and with confidence, so that appropriate treatments can be applied. Each hour delay in the detection of sepsis has been reported to correspond to an 8% increase in mortality. So the need for a rapid and accurate diagnostic is recognized. Traditional methods rely on detection of the specific pathogen causing the infection, and these methods often take more than 24 hours, and find a pathogen in only 30% of clinically confirmed cases because they’re trying to detect a minuscule amount of pathogen or pathogenic product in the blood. Our approach was to use the host’s own immune system, which is highly tuned to respond to the presence of pathogens. Around 30% of all genes are dysregulated in sepsis, so there is a huge signal base to draw from. The trick with using multi marker host response is to pick out the specific combination of gene expression patterns that cover the broad range of patients that present with sepsis and who may present either early or late in the episode, thus with different gene activation patterns.
This paper describes a simple combination of such genes that can be used to detect sepsis and performs over the full range of patients irrespective of stage of infection or severity of infection. In it’s current format, the test is manual and takes 4-6 hours, and is a great advance on the current tools, however the methods we’ve used are specifically designed to meet requirements to port this assay onto a fully automated Point of Care platform that could deliver a result in under 90 minutes.
