The simple hospital mistake that could kill you

And it's almost entirely preventable.

In a piece published this morning that was four months in the making, Vox's Sarah Kliff discusses a relatively simple medical technique called the central line. A central line is a tube placed into a patient's chest that runs directly to her heart; medicine can then be pumped through the tube straight into the patient's bloodstream. This method is preferable for delivering lifesaving medication because it is the fastest and most effective way to spread the medication throughout the body.

The problem, as Kliff reports, is that when the tube is improperly inserted and bacteria enters the line, it can cause a bloodstream infection precisely because of the tube's direct line to the heart. "At best, these infections cause suffering for already-sick patients," Kliff writes. "At worst, they kill them."

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Nearly 10,000 patients died of central line infections in 2013, despite the fact that a Johns Hopkins physician named Peter Pronovost developed a five-step strategy to prevent introducing bacteria when inserting central lines almost 15 years ago. Read Kliff's entire piece on the deadly-but-preventable infections over at Vox.