Hospital-Based Surveillance of Infection-Related Mortality in South Korea

Abstract

Public Health Reports / November–December 2009 / Volume 124 883 This article by Choi et al. describes the findings from 19 tertiary-care teaching hospitals in South Korea. At first, the finding that infectious diseases are attributed to 29% of all in-hospital deaths seems unexpected. Then we realize that the numbers, while surprising, are not unusual. In the United States, hospital-acquired infections are a countrywide problem. It has been estimated that each year nearly two million patients get an infection while being treated in our nation’s hospitals, and almost 100,000 of them die in the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the cost of hospital-acquired infections to be as high as $27.5 billion each year.1 The findings in this study and elsewhere bring to light the fact that even the “most developed” countries, such as South Korea, the United Kingdom,2 and the United States, still face a constant and, in some cases, increasing threat from infection-related mortality in hospital settings. It is also interesting to note that pneumonia and septicemia remain the most common causes of death. The sentinel hospital-based surveillance system is an important step toward developing and maintaining a useful monitoring system to control routine and extraordinary infectious diseases. Other studies in the literature set up a standardized methodology for the mining and investigation of infection control surveillance.3 This article, however, is the first to evaluate the proportions of infectious diseases among all in-hospital mortality cases as either the direct or underlying cause of death and investigate the description of infectious causes of in-hospital death in South Korea.