New approach cuts sepsis diagnosis from days to hours

Sepsis, a life-threatening condition that stems from the body trying to fight off an infection, plagues more than 1.5 million patients a year in the U.S. alone, with one in three deaths recorded in hospitals attributed in part to sepsis. Despite the severity of the condition, which can kill in as little as 12 hours, it takes between two and seven days for most traditional approaches to definitively identify sepsis-causing bacteria in blood infections.