Activists help reduce hospital infections.(THE CONSUMERS UNION PERSPECTIVE)(Staphylococcus aureus)

It's been four years since Sandi Grello of Allentown, Pa., had hip surgery. Her hip joint healed just fine, but the antibiotic-resistant staph infection she got in the hospital still affects her life.

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A few days after surgery, she developed a raging fever and was rushed back to the hospital. She had become septic from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), an increasingly common cause of hospital-acquired infection. It took a week in the hospital and eight months of recuperation before she was strong enough to return to work.

Grello now takes daily antibiotics and meets with an infectious-disease specialist every three months to keep the infection at bay.

PUSHING FOR PROTECTION

Grello is one of almost 2,000 consumers who sent their stories to Consumers Union's Stop Hospital Infections campaign, which is pushing for a federal law requiring hospitals to report the rate at which patients develop infections during treatment at their facilities.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that up to 2 million patients develop a variety of infections while being treated in hospitals each year and that almost 100,000 of them die. Infections add billions of dollars to health-care bills every year because patients who acquire them need extra care and often require more days in the hospital.