Ignaz Semmelweis and the birth of infection control

Many of these people develop sepsis from infections acquired as patients while in a hospital. Infections acquired in the hospital are called nosocomial infections. They are the most common complica- tions of hospitalized patients, with 5-10% of patients in acute care hospitals acquiring at least one infection. Nosocomial infections occur in 2 million patients per year in the United States, causing 90 000 deaths and resulting in $4.5-5.7 bil- lion in additional patient care costs. 2 There he observed that women delivered by physicians and medical students had a much higher rate (13- 18%) of post-delivery mortality (called puerperal fever or childbed fever) than women delivered by midwife trainees or midwives (2%). This case-control analysis led Semmelweis to consider several hypotheses. He concluded that the higher rates of infections in women delivered by physicians and medical students were associated with the handling of corpses during autopsies before attending the pregnant women. This was not done by the midwives. He associated the exposure to cadaveric material with an increased risk of childbed fever, 5