Article: Maryland Considers Tracking Hospital Infections; Bill Would Require Keeping Data on Illnesses Patients Contract While in Facilities

Mark Bennett went to the hospital last February with pneumonia and never came home. When he died, four months after being admitted and after passing through five hospitals, his body had been assaulted by six separate bacterial infections, according to his son, Michael Bennett. One forced doctors to amputate a leg, and another was formally listed as the 89-year-old's cause of death.

Family members believe that the hospitals where Mark Bennett spent the last months of his life not only did not save him from death but actually sped his demise by failing to follow basic rules of hygiene.

"He had almost no interruption in suffering," Michael Bennett, of Baltimore, said of his father. "It was ...

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