On Saturday, November 24th, 2018, I tragically lost my son Farès, a child just 13 years old, to sepsis caused by appendicitis.

Farès was a brilliant student attending 4th grade of a college in the Paris region, France.

The week preceding his death, he suffered from abdominal pain and vomiting. During this week, Farès underwent several consultations with both general practitioners and hospital doctors. Everyone came to the same medical finding. According to the doctors, Farès suffered from gastroenteritis. It was a chaotic journey!

Finally, after the fourth doctor visit, Farès was hospitalized, but unfortunately, he did not undergo a radiological examination, only a biological assessment which showed inflammation that did not raise concern for the medical team.

Farès had two major pain attacks in the night of his hospitalization, which were not seen as an emergency, while I kept actively requesting the presence of a doctor. Eventually the next morning, Farès had a septic shock, and even though I was present and alerted the team immediately so that he would be taken care of, the team persisted in saying that it was an anxiety attack.

However, at this point, Farès was at only 60% oxygen saturation, his skin began to mottle and his blood pressure was low. It was then when he would have a cardiac arrest and died in front of me.

Following this drama, I started my research on sepsis and it was then when I discovered that it is a major global public health problem. That's how I got in touch with both the Global Sepsis Alliance and the European Sepsis Alliance. Thanks to these organizations, the latter will mark the beginning of my fight.

I created the France Sepsis Association, an association of patients and families affected by sepsis whose objectives are to raise awareness among the general public and health professionals. Our goal is to avoid deaths caused by sepsis thanks to rapid treatment and early recognition by general practitioners, who should refer patients to the appropriate care unit.

My ambition is to help European and global organizations to lower the mortality rate. Sepsis deaths are preventable if taken care of early and through active education.

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The article above was written by Jamila Hedjal and is shared here with her explicit consent. The views in the article do not necessarily represent those of the Global Sepsis Alliance. They are not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. The whole team here at the GSA and World Sepsis Day wishes to thank Jamila for sharing her son’s story and for fighting to raise awareness for sepsis.

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During the last couple of months, healthcare systems all around the world were and still are confronted with an extraordinary challenge. The pandemic affects all of us, yet it seems to impact each individual differently.

Hospitalized and preterm newborns are especially vulnerable, which in turn has an effect on their parents. There have been many parents struggling with the very restricted or even prohibited access to the neonatal units due to COVID-19.

This separation of parents from their babies has been decided upon using no current evidence and the long-term consequences of the restrictions are enormous. The lack of skin-to-skin care, breastfeeding, and the exclusion of the parents in their babies’ care affect newborns and their parents alike.

Babies born prematurely often have a weakened immune system, making them especially susceptible to sepsis.

Today the GLANCE Network started its global campaign "Zero Separation. Together for better care!" - keep preterm and sick babies close to their parents. The GLANCE (Global Alliance for Newborn Care) wants to raise the awareness of the need to adequately support families and babies born too soon, too small, and too sick - a case wholeheartedly supported by the Global Sepsis Alliance and the World Sepsis Day Movement.

GSA Executive Committee member Prof. Flavia Machado was interviewed by the JAMA Network on "Coronavirus in Brazil - Report From The Front Lines" - embedded above and available on YouTube directly.

The interview provides a very insightful overview on how Brazil is tackling the pandemic, the efficiency of treatments, and solutions adopted by hospitals to respond to the crisis. Interestingly, Prof. Machado confirmed that in most cases people are dying from refractory septic shock rather than refractory hypoxemia.

Besides, she noted that the usual differences between high-income countries (HICs) and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where 85% of sepsis cases occur, are not so visible with COVID-19. In fact, the most affected countries have been HICs so far.

Prof. Machado is chair of the intensive care session of Anesthesiology, Pain and Intensive Care Department at the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil, and CEO of the Latin American Sepsis Institute (LASI).

We are happy to have our World Sepsis Day Infographics, and Sepsis Awareness Posters now available in Finnish, in addition to English, Portuguese,Spanish, French, Italian, and German. These include the brand-new design that is easier to read and comprehend, and, most importantly, include the staggering findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study released in The Lancet in January.

As always, the new infographics and posters are a quick and free download in our World Sepsis Day Toolkit Section – please download them and use them as you see fit, on your social media channels, printed at your events, and everywhere in between.

Like in the other languages, there are a total of 21 infographics, nine on sepsis itself, ranging from symptoms, sources, prevention, risk groups, to physiology, post-sepsis symptoms, and more. Additionally, there are two on hand-washing (even more important nowadays), and ten more highlighting the relationship to other World Health Days, such as World AIDS Day, World Immunization Week, and more. The infographics are available as images (.jpg), as well as optimized for print (.pdf).

All posters are optimized for print, A3 (297 × 420 millimeters, 11.69 × 16.54 inches), and PDF. They are a quick and free download in our WSD Toolkit Section. We encourage you to download, print, and hang them up in your organization to raise awareness of sepsis.

We put a lot of thought and time into the posters and infographics – please contact us to give feedback so we can improve them even further. Lastly, please consider donating to support the ongoing development of our free sepsis awareness resources – thanks!

The GSA congratulates the Executive Committee member Professor Simon Finfer for being awarded an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to intensive care medicine, to medical research and education, and to global health institutes.

On June 8th 2020, the Governor-General announced the Queen’s Birthday 2020 Honors List, recognizing 933 Australians.

“This list recognizes a group of outstanding Australians who have made a contribution to their community, to Australia globally or domestically. Their efforts have been noted by their peers, they have been nominated and assessed independently as worthy of recognition”, the Governor-General said.

Besides other roles, Professor Finfer has been in charge of intensive care research at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney for nearly 30 years and he is Director of Intensive Care at the Sydney Adventist Hospital.

In the interview to the Australian broadcaster ABC, Professor Finfer talks about the challenges that COVID-19 has posed to the Australian health system and about the preparedness and effective response of the country to the pandemic.

In The Sydney Morning Herald, Professor Finfer highlights the link between COVID-19 and sepsis. "People who are dying of coronavirus disease in intensive care units are dying of sepsis," he said. "The coronavirus infects the lungs, and in severe cases, leads to sepsis resulting in kidney, liver, and other organs failing."

Update July 1st, 2020: Applications for the 2020 GSA Awards are now closed. The jury will examine all candidatures and the winners will be communicated in the coming weeks.

Original Article:
Applications and nominations for the 2020 GSA Awards close June 30th, 2020. If you know of any aspirational sepsis related projects, please encourage them to apply, or nominate them yourself.

The GSA Awards honor major contributions in the fight against sepsis every year and are exclusively and kindly sponsored by the Erin Kay Flatley Memorial Foundation.

The awards are granted in three categories:

1. Governments and healthcare authorities

2. Non-Governmental organizations, patient advocate groups, or healthcare provider groups

3. Individual nominees

In addition to recognition, prestige, and of course a beautiful trophy, winners of category 2 and 3 are awarded $ 2,500 each.

Our new 2020 WSD Infographics are now available in Portuguese and French, in addition to English, Spanish, Italian, and German. These include a brand-new design that is more mature, easier to read and comprehend, and, most importantly, include the staggering findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study released in The Lancet in January.

As always, the new infographics are a quick and free download in our World Sepsis Day Toolkit Section – please download them and use them as you see fit, on your social media channels, printed at your events, and everywhere in between.

There is a total of 21 infographics, nine on sepsis itself, ranging from symptoms, sources, prevention, risk groups, to physiology, post-sepsis symptoms, and more. Additionally, there are two on hand-washing (even more important nowadays), and ten more highlighting the relationship to other World Health Days, such as World AIDS Day, World Immunization Week, and more. The infographics are available as images (.jpg), as well as optimized for print (.pdf).

We put a lot of thought and time into the new infographics – please contact us to give feedback so we can improve them even further. Lastly, please consider donating to support the ongoing development of our free sepsis awareness resources – thanks!

My name is Eli, I’m 39 years old now, and I am a sepsis shock survivor. I was born in Eritrea but raised in Germany where I still live. My septic shock happened in September 2016, when I was 36 years old.

I've had extreme period pain since my youth and it only got worse after I had kids. I tried many therapies, but none worked, and one doctor finally recommended laparoscopy and endometrial abrasion to get rid of the problem once and for all, both routine surgeries.

After this routine procedure the doctor told me everything went well and nothing vicious had been found and they would discharge me from the hospital. My husband and I were relieved but when I wanted to use the bathroom before getting dressed, I felt very dizzy and couldn’t hold myself.

My husband and the nurse helped me to use the toilet and put me back to bed. My blood pressure was very low and I started to vomit.

The doctor came to see me but was dismissive about the symptoms, arrogantly declaring, “Well, you probably just didn’t tolerate the anesthesia. I already told you that you can go home because everything went well.”

Thank god my incredible husband insisted that I stay at the hospital. Something didn’t feel right. During the night I woke up because I thought I peed in my bed. I switched on the light and I saw myself lying in a pool of blood. I called the nurse. They taped my bellybutton and I went back to sleep. I woke up in a pool of blood again. They then stitched my bellybutton.

The next day I kept feeling worse and worse, but the medical staff didn’t pay much attention to my deteriorating condition until I started to complain about severe pain in my belly. The doctors conjectured that maybe a bowel loop got tangled up and they decided to do a CT scan which didn’t turn up anything.

I started to lose blood from the IVs in my arm. It flowed like water from a tap. I later learned I was suffering DIC -Disseminated intravascular Coagulation. My feet hurt like someone was trying to rip them off. My parents and my husband said they never saw anyone in such pain. I started to lose consciousness.
My last words were, “Don’t you worry, God will watch over me.”

Eventually they decided to perform another laparoscopy and saw that I had an ovary thrombosis on the left side. They immediately sliced open my belly (laparotomy) to make sure I had no pulmonary embolism which I didn’t. Instead I had a lot of inner bleedings and it was pouring from every hole.

By that point I was in a septic shock and my life was hanging by a thread. Sepsis was spreading through my body like wildfire. The operating team decided not to get me back out of the sleep they had put me in and left me in a drug-induced coma. Having first nearly killed me through neglect, the doctors and nurses fell into a panic as they realized this young patient – me – was about to die.

The hospital I was at wasn’t equipped for that kind of emergency. They only had a tiny intensive care unit and were running out of blood bags. The team frantically called the city’s big hospitals. After the first two turned them down, one said they would take me in. An ambulance with me inside raced the 5.6miles with howling sirens on empty roads in the early morning hours.

When we arrived at the new hospital, the sepsis had already killed my ovaries and uterus. Slicing open my belly yet again, the surgical team removed them but – thankfully – decided my vital organs were largely unharmed. Having removed the main source of the infection and with a powerful antibiotic finally kicking in, I survived. The doctors would later point out how I had been snatched from the jaws of death.

However, that didn’t mean the end of my pain. They left me in my coma for a week and it took me another week to fully wake up, including four days spent in intensive-care unit delirium. Severe and extremely frightening hallucinations set in, turning those four days in the worst time of my life. The hospital staff – presumably overworked and used to the sight of people screaming for protection from non-existent enemies – didn’t help much. At one point, they tied my arms to the bed so I wouldn’t rip the tube out of my throat or the many other cables and IVs from my arms and neck. I had pulled out the feeding tube from my nose earlier…

The agony wasn’t over. Before they moved me to a regular care unit, they had to cut me open one more time to clean out more inner bleeding.

That wasn’t all. Even though my overall health improved once I had left the hospital and gone through rehabilitation, a strong pain in my left arm would just not go away. Again, the various doctors I consulted said it’s normal and I shouldn’t worry too much. Only when I had an X-ray done after 13 months a thin wire showed up in the picture did the radiologist realize that the first hospital’s operating team had left a 15-inch wire in my arm.

Another surgery followed in which they removed the wire. However, it had been in my arm for so long it had grown into the tissue and the surgeons had to destroy part of the artery to get it out. My left arm now suffers from undersupply of oxygen. It frequently hurts and there’s a long-term risk of losing it.

I have been in pain ever since that fateful day of my first surgery. It’s not just my arm and my abdomen; my whole body and soul hurt. Still, I’m thankful to the phenomenal doctors and nurses at the second hospital, without whom I wouldn’t be here anymore. And to my marvelous family and friends, especially my wonderful kids, my loving husband, my heroic sister, and my self-sacrificing parents. I am forever grateful even though I am exhausted from the lasting damage.

 What I wish for the future is that the medical staff takes every patient seriously. And after the patient was lucky enough to leave the hospital alive that there is more education about sepsis. Because I felt or still feel like no one is there to help me with the aftermath. Sepsis education needs to spread so more people can survive.

It’s so crazy that even educated doctors often miss the signs – my septic shock was recognized only 15 hours after I showed first signs. The first hospital was very dismissive about my symptoms until it was almost too late.

Unfortunately, more than 3 years later, I still don’t know what led to the sepsis. The doctors never found out. But what is clear is that I came to the routine surgery healthy but left it almost dead. And what is even worse is that a lot of my suffering would have been easily preventable by simply listening to me and taking me seriously.

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The article above was written by Eli Arons and is shared here with her explicit consent. The views in the article do not necessarily represent those of the Global Sepsis Alliance. They are not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. The whole team here at the GSA and World Sepsis Day wishes to thank Eli for sharing her story and for fighting to raise awareness for sepsis.

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