Sepsis causes more deaths than all cancers combined! So what is Sepsis?
Sepsis is a frequently fatal condition marked by the presence of infectious material in the blood stream. Saving the life of someone with Sepsis depends how quickly a diagnosis is made and a suitable antibiotic can be injected into the patient’s vein.
Currently, if Sepsis is diagnosed quickly, the attending doctor will choose an antibiotic that has a high probability of killing the infections organisms without knowing what the organisms are. However the long term consequences of doing this include increasing antimicrobial resistance in potentially fatal infections, and reducing the effectiveness of future treatments of Sepsis in other patients.
Tim’s research has been focussed on reducing the time from drawing a blood sample from patients and the identification of the organism responsible for Sepsis and, very importantly, the best antibiotics for treating the patients and saving their lives. The international standard for this is 4 hours: this means if it takes longer than 4 hours to do this, the capacity for avoiding major organ failure and death is greatly reduced.
And because antimicrobial resistance is increasing, it is important that pharmaceutical companies keep looking for new antibiotics to replace those that are no longer effective. Getting approval to use these new treatments is another barrier - the approval process takes a long time, mostly for very good reasons.
Tim and his team are getting increasing attention for their work internationally, and they will be presenting their latest research to a European Congress in April.
On a personal note:
Towards the end of April 2020, I took Helen to her regular chemotherapy session at the Mount Hospital. As a regular consequence of this. her immune system would be compromised for a few days. During this time she acquired an infection and it became clear it was spreading in her body. Her oncologist requested an ambulance to take her back to the Mount, but not before she had been cleared for COVID-19. This took several hours. She was admitted to a single room at the Mount and her oncologist decided to begin intravenous antibiotics, after he got approval from Canberra to use a particular antibiotic.
When I returned to visit Helen the next day, her oncologist dropped in and took me aside - “We nearly lost her last night! Fortunately the antibiotics kicked in and did their work but Helen will need to stay in hospital for several weeks to recover.” A few days later, Helen told me she had decided to discontinue chemotherapy and die on her own terms, which she did, very peacefully, in September.
