An estimated 1 out of every 25 patients will get an infection on any given day while being treated in a U.S. hospital, and 1 out of 9 of those infected will die, according to new data released today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Though there has been progress made to improve patient safety efforts, the agency said more work is needed.

‘This is probably the best quality of data we’ve had a in a long time,” said Dr. Michael Bell, deputy director of the CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, regarding two new reports. They sound the alarm, he said, about the specific threats that require national attention.

Nearly 722,000 hospital-acquired infections occurred in acute-care hospitals in the U.S. in 2011, and about 75,000 patients with the infections died during their hospital stays, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. More than half of all these infections occurred outside of the intensive-care unit.

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The findings were based on 2011 data from 183 U.S. hospitals and looked at a wide range of hospital infections. The most common […]