Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock

Epsis is one of the oldest and most elusive syndromes in medicine. Hippocrates claimed that sepsis ( ) was the process by which flesh rots, swamps generate foul airs, and wounds fester. However, with the advent of modern antibiotics, germ theory did not fully explain the pathogenesis of sepsis: many patients with sepsis died despite successful eradication of the inciting pathogen. Thus, researchers suggested that it was the host, not the germ, that drove the pathogenesis of sepsis. n 1992, an international consensus panel defined sepsis as a systemic inflammatory response to infection, noting that sepsis could arise in response to multiple infectious causes and that septicemia was neither a necessary condition…