Orlando, FL, February 24, 2004, -- The first clinical management guidelines ever to address the treatment of patients with severe sepsis were unveiled today at the 33rd Annual Critical Care Congress of the Society for Critical Care Medicine. The product of an historic collaboration of critical care professionals from around the world, the Surviving Sepsis Campaign Guidelines for Management of Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock provide clinicians with evidence-based recommendations as part of an effort that could save over 50,000 lives annually in the United States, and hundreds of thousands worldwide.

"In many other disease areas, treatment practice guidelines have been effective at improving care and, in many cases, saving lives," said R. Phillip Dellinger, M.D., Director, Critical Care Section, Cooper University Hospital/Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Camden, N.J, and Co-Chair of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign's Guidelines Committee. "We are pleased to offer these tools to clinicians in critical care, and hope they are put into practice now against one of the most deadly enemies our profession faces every day."

The guidelines, in addition to today's presentation, will also appear in the March issues of both Critical Care Medicine and Intensive Care Medicine. Following those publications, the guidelines will be posted on line, free of charge, at the SCCM site, and the sites of participating organizations.

Among the recommendations made by the guidelines committee to their colleagues:

• More aggressive recognition and diagnosis of sepsis in all hospital departments
• Monitoring of central venous oxygen saturation levels
• Empiric, timely antibiotic therapy to fight the underlying infection
• Maintenance of adequate blood pressure through IV fluids and/or medications
• When localizable, removal or reduction of the source of the infection (for instance, removal of a potentially infected catheter or drainage of an absces
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Contact: Barbara Goldberg
bgoldberg@belsitoco.com
212-586-8877
Belsito & Company
24-Feb-2004


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