UK has the highest sepsis death rates for women

Sepsis death rates in Britain are five times higher than the best performing country in Europe, a new study suggests.

A scientific analysis of 36 rich nations ranked the UK as being the worst for women and it placed near the bottom of the table for men. 

There are 35.4 deaths from sepsis – a violent immune response to an infection – for every 100,000 women and 40.3 for every 100,000 men in the UK.

The US ranked seventh worst for women – but avoided being named as one of the ten biggest offenders in men. 

Researchers accepted the UK has made progress in reducing sepsis death rates, but declines were not as pronounced as seen in other countries.

The figures, which compare rates for each country in 1985 and 2015, are set to be presented at the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine in Paris.

Finland scored the lowest for both men and women, with death rates dropping to around 10 and 6.5 per 100,000 in 2015, respectively.

Thirty years ago, the Scandinavian country’s rate was higher than the UK for men (51 per 100,000) – but not women (32 per 100,000).

Sepsis kills around 44,000 people in the UK every year and occurs when the body reacts to an infection by attacking its own organs and tissues.

In the last two years, NHS watchdog Nice has published new guidelines for doctors telling them to treat the condition with the same urgency as a heart attack. 

The Government has also launched awareness campaigns for the public on how to spot the symptoms which include rapid breathing and discoloured skin.

The Mail has been campaigning to raise the profile of sepsis since 2016 following the death of one-year-old William Mead. 

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Imperial College London were behind the analysis of 30 year trends in sepsis deaths.

They used figures from the World Health Organisation’s mortality database to track the decline in 36 nations, including Australia, Canada and Ireland. 

Overall, the average death rate from sepsis fell from 36.2 per 100,000 men in 1985 to 27.1 per 100,000 in 2015.

There are 35.4 deaths from sepsis – a violent immune response to an infection – for every 100,000 women and 40.3 for every 100,000 men in the UK

And for women, the median death rate fell from 23.2 in 100,000 to 19.6 in 100,000 during the same period.

Countries which managed to reduce death rates most significantly were Finland, Iceland and Ireland.

But increases in death rates were noted in both Denmark and Lithuania.

The authors concluded: ‘Overall, we observed a decrease in reported sepsis-related mortality across the majority of analysed nations between 1985 and 2015.

‘However, there remains significant variability between health systems with respect to trends in sepsis-related mortality and between sexes in some countries.’