Sepsis symptoms as 50% of screening tools to spot deadly infection 'don't work'

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Sepsis is a life threatening disease and new research suggests that many could be going unnoticed. Scientists latest findings have found that 50 percent of screening tools used by emergency medical professionals to identify the deadly infection in patients don't work.

When it comes to Sepsis, early detection is vital for survival as it can be fatal if left untreated.Data presented today (September 19) at the European Emergency Medicine Congress states that two out of the four internationally-recommended screening tools used by by emergency medical services (EMS) are "inadequate" for recognising sepsis.

According to the NHS, sepsis occurs when the body overreacts to an infection, resulting in severe organ damage and death in some cases.

Sepsis Research reports that 4,000 Scots are diagnosed annually. Scientists in University of Magdeburg and Jena in Germany analysed data of 221,429 patients seen by emergency services outside of a hospital setting in 2016.They found that only one out of four screening tools - NEWS-2 (National Early Warning Score), MEWS (Modified Early Warning Score), SIRS (Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome), qSOFA (quick Sequential Organ Failure Assessment) - had a reasonably accurate prediction rate for sepsis.Out of all four, NEWS-2 was able to correctly predict 72.2 per cent of all sepsis cases and identified 81.4 per cent of negative, non-septic, cases.