Increased awareness about sepsis often leads to patients being labelled septic even without an infection, a doctor from the UK said in the city on Friday.

“Often, because it presents in a non-specific manner, patients who have not got an infection are labelled septic when they might have a completely different condition that will not respond to antibiotics,” Mervyn Singer, who teaches intensive care medicine at the University College London, said.

Singer is one of the speakers at Medicon International, organised by Peerless Hospital and BK Roy Foundation with the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, and the Bengal chapter of the Association of Physicians of India.

Critical care is one of the areas of emphasis in the sixth edition of the two-day conference.

Sepsis, one of the leading global killers, is a life-threatening condition caused by the body’s response to an infection. In lay terms, sepsis is a condition when the body acts on itself, damaging its own organs instead of focussing on killing the bug.

Sepsis is “estimated to affect more than 30 million people worldwide every year, potentially leading to 6 million deaths”, according to the World Health Organisation. Several studies have suggested that close to 100,000 people die of sepsis in India every year.

“You can have many conditions that can mimic sepsis, like pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas), where the trigger is not related to infection. There is a whole list of different causes whose symptoms can be very similar. The danger in labelling patients septic and giving antibiotics is that the antibiotics will not work but cause harm because the patient doesn’t have an infection,” Singer said.

“Also, because you’ve labelled the person as having sepsis, you might then not think about other conditions, which may require a completely different treatment.”

There is no specific blood test at the moment that can diagnose sepsis, Singer said. “A doctor has to use a combination of clinical history, clinical skills and tests that can suggest but do not give a firm diagnosis.”

Antibiotics are often administered on patients with sepsis symptoms because every minute is crucial, a city-based doctor said.

“An hour’s delay in appropriate antibiotic treatment increases the mortality risk by approximately 10 per cent,” Chandramouli Bhattacharya, specialist in tropical medicine and infectious diseases, said.

Derek Bell, president of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, said: “The main aim of this conference is the sharing of knowledge. With an explosion of knowledge the patient becomes an equal partner in making decisions.”