By Healthcare Facilities Today

According to the latest report from Portugal's national health board, a quarter of hospital patients who died in 2011 had picked up a hospital infection, but it is “impossible” to know exactly how many died from the bug, according to an article on the Portugal News website.

The report said that in 2011, 11,357 deaths had a hospital bug associated to them, or 24.3 percent of the 46,733 overall deaths registered. The report said that “it is not possible to know the exact extent of mortality associated to hospital infections,” according to the article.

“In a small number of cases death could be due to a hospital infection. In other cases it might not be the cause but a contributing factor to death. And in other cases the death could be due to the primary pathology with the presence of an infection being irrelevant to the final result”, the article quoted the report as saying.

José Artur Paiva, director of the Control of Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance programme, said that between nine and eleven percent of in-patients pick up or have a hospital bug, whereas the European average is between six and seven percent, according to the article.

Read the article.