A REDLANDS man wants Australian hospitals to change the protocol which they use to treat people with sepsis, a life threatening illness caused by the body's response to infection.
Garry Bowles, who contracted the disease in June, said that an effective and relatively inexpensive way of treating sepsis had been developed in the United States but had not been taken up in Australia.
The treatment featured an intravenous cocktail of vitamin C, thiamine (vitamin B1) and hydrocortisone.
Mr Bowles said this was cheap compared with conventional treatments featuring high doses of antibiotics.
He said that he started researching the issue after he had become ill.
Princess Alexandra Hospital-based Statewide Sepsis Clinical Network chairman Bala Venkatesh said the work on thiamine, and vitamin C came from a small US study.
"It is currently being evaluated in larger formal clinical trials," Professor Venkiatesh said. "The results of these trials are awaited."
He said the Statewide Sepsis Clinical Network would review the results which might take at least two years to complete.
It would then make a recommendation on the use of vitamin C and ascorbic acid.
He said he had led Australian researchers on the world's largest study on hydrocortisone in septic shock.
The next iteration of sepsis treatment guidelines would take these trials into account.
Mr Bowles said the new treatment was relatively harmless and would not make a patient worse so it should be started regardless of trials.
"There's nothing to lose with such treatments," he said. "It's cheap so why not?"
The Australian Sepsis Network said about 5000 people died of sepsis in Australia each year, more than the national road toll, breast, prostate or colo-rectal cancer.
It says sepsis, or septicemia, is a last-ditch effort by our immune system to fight an infection. It can lead to multiple organ failure and death unless promptly treated.
It has a morality rate of nearly 30 per cent. Sepsis is often overlooked and is notoriously difficult to treat. Beating sepsis relies on early detection and rapid treatment.
Under the new treatment regime developed in the US, mortality rate dropped to fewer than 1 per cent and costs were cut radically.
The protocol has been set up as the standard of care for sepsis at a few US hospitals.
The sepsis network says the protocol is not supplanting or replacing other treatments.
It says even if a debate over the protocol continued, patients should not be denied the opportunity to be given an inexpensive and non-toxic therapy, especially when a high chance of death loomed.
