Infection epidemic carves deadly path.

Byline: Michael J. Berens

A hidden epidemic of life-threatening infections is contaminating America's hospitals, needlessly killing tens of thousands of patients each year.

These infections often are characterized by the health-care industry as random and inevitable byproducts of lifesaving care. But a Tribune investigation found that in 2000, nearly three-quarters of the deadly infections_or about 75,000_were preventable, the result of unsanitary facilities, germ-laden instruments and unwashed hands.

The industry's stance also obscures a disturbing trend buried within government and private health-care records: Infection rates are soaring nationally, exacerbated by hospital cutbacks and carelessness by doctors and nurses.

Deaths linked to hospital germs now represent the fourth leading cause of mortality among Americans, behind heart disease, cancer and strokes, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These infections kill more people each year than car accidents, fires and drowning combined.

Hospital infections often are preventable by adopting simple, inexpensive measures. Strict adherence to clean-hand policies alone could prevent the deaths of up to 20,000 patients each year, according to the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"The number of people needlessly killed by hospital infections is unbelievable, but the public doesn't know anything about it," said Dr. Barry Farr, a leading infection-control expert and president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.

"For years, we've just been quietly bundling the bodies of patients off to the morgue while infection rates get higher and higher."

Hospitals provide ideal reservoirs for germs, with temperature-controlled environments and a steady stream of germ-carrying strangers pouring through the doors each day.

Germs that wouldn't be harmful to healthy people in their homes or at work can turn deadly for patients too young, too old or too weak to fight the infection.

In Chicago in 1998, as fever-ridden health-care workers tended to patients and as others worked without always washing their hands, eight children died of an infection that spread from a Southwest Side pediatric medical center into a hospital. The flulike outbreak, which the city of Chicago never revealed to the public, was halted weeks later after three dozen sick health-care workers were ordered to stay home.

The rare virus found in Chicago has since been linked to the deaths of children in medical facilities in three states.

In a Detroit hospital, as doctors and nurses moved about the pediatric intensive care unit without washing hands, infections killed four babies in the same row of bassinets, according to court records and interviews. But it took three months for administrators to close the nursery for cleaning.

Staphylococcus germs thriving inside a West Palm Beach, Fla., hospital invaded more than 100 cardiac patients, killing 13, according to court records. The survivors underwent painful and debilitating surgery, as rotting bone was cut from their bodies.

The health-care industry's penchant for secrecy and a lack of meaningful government oversight cloak the problem. Hospitals are not legally required to disclose infection rates, and most don't. Likewise, doctors are not required to tell patients about risk or exposure to hospital germs.

Even a term adopted by the CDC_nosocomial infection_obscures the true source of the germs. Nosocomial is Latin for hospital. CDC records show that the term was used to shield hospitals from…