Hospital infections: consumers drive a movement.(The Consumers Union Perspective)

Two Missouri residents are the latest examples of the power of consumers when they band together, in this case to work with Consumers Union's campaign for the public disclosure of hospital-acquired infections.

Ray Wagner never planned to become a consumer advocate for patient safety His teenaged son, Raymond, got an infection in late 2002 while being treated at a Missouri hospital for a broken arm. After six surgeries related to the infection and treatment with antibiotics, Raymond has almost recovered. His father has put his experience as a business lobbyist to work to stop hospital-acquired infections.

Kim Gardner, also in Missouri, lost her mother in 1999 to a staph infection she got at a hospital after having survived bypass surgery "I was forced to make the hardest decision I will ever make, which was to take my mother off the ventilator and let her go in peace," Gardner says. Her grief and anger spurred a personal-letter-writing campaign to policymakers, urging tracking and reporting of hospital-acquired infections.

The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 90,000 Americans die each year from infections they get in the hospital. Between 5 and 10 percent of the patients who are admitted to U.S. acute-care hospitals acquire one or more infections there, and the risks have steadily increased to recent decades, according to a February 2003 article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Only a handful of hospitals voluntarily report infections to the government, and that information is confidential.

Consumers Union, the publisher of CONSUMER REPORTS, initiated the Stop Hospital Infections campaign to support public disclosure of infection rates because it will give hospitals stronger incentives to reduce infection risks. It will ...