![\"Hollie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/\/f4e6f291-ae4f-45ab-92f4-716ded6d3570.jpg\")
<\/p>\nIn the middle of the first lockdown, Hollie Smith was a bright-eyed teenager, ready to go to university. <\/p>\n
But instead of entering higher education, she spent a large portion of that year hospitalised and on her own, without family members allowed in the hospital during the pandemic. <\/p>\n
After getting a urinary tract infection, Smith had called 111 and was told she might have a kidney stone. She went to hospital and was soon discharged \u2014 only to have a seizure on the way to the exit. <\/p>\n
She actually had sepsis, a serious blood infection that began a five-year journey which would put her in a coma, cause multiple seizures and lead her to eventually need a wheelchair.<\/p>\n
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Hollie Smith before she fell ill with sepsis<\/p>\n
\u201cI was a healthy, fit, sporty, academic 18-year-old. I would never have ever thought that this would be my life like five years down the line,\u201d Smith, now 23, said. <\/p>\n
Estimates from the World Health Organisation (WHO) suggest that one in five deaths worldwide are due to sepsis. And, according to Dr Ron Daniels from the UK Sepsis Trust, sepsis cases are now on the rise globally due to ageing populations, antimicrobial resistance and changing definitions of the infection. <\/p>\n
\u2022 What causes sepsis \u2014 and are cases on the rise?<\/a><\/p>\n Yet in Britain there is no national database for cases of sepsis. \u201cUnlike for conditions such as stroke, kidney failure, heart attack, there is no national database and no national disease registry for people with sepsis or severe infection,\u201d Daniels said. The charity has estimated from hospital admission figures that sepsis is responsible for 48,000 deaths each year and 11 million deaths globally \u2014 more deaths, it said, than cancer.<\/p>\n Because of the lack of a database, it is hard to study why sepsis progresses rapidly in some cases \u2014 like the MP Craig MacKinlay who underwent a quadruple amputation<\/a> \u2014 and extremely slowly in others, like in the teenager Martha Mills<\/a> and Smith. It can also make it hard for specialists to study which antibiotics work best for each case, making treatment more difficult. <\/p>\n The MP Craig MacKinlay in hospital after his quadruple amputation in 2023<\/p>\n BBC<\/p>\n According to Daniels, sepsis care had been improving in the UK before the pandemic, with a national plan in place. But since then, the progress has stalled. \u201cWe have gone backwards, and NHS England have not produced an updated National Action Plan since 2017,\u201d he said. \u201dSo [we\u2019ve] really stagnated for a number of years.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are calling not only for a new national action plan, but also, we need to deliver the very best sepsis care, given that it\u2019s physically interlinked with antimicrobial resistance,\u201d Daniels added.<\/p>\n![\"Craig](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/\/ea6dab5c-d0e6-4f45-bf0d-bf0391518c07.jpg\")
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