My Daily Domestic Diigolet 02/14/2008

Jem Abbott, a healthy 37-year-old, had gone into hospital for a vasectomy, the male sterilisation operation performed on more than 100,000 men every year in Britain.

The operation is routine, yet a little over a week later Jem was dead, the victim of septicaemia.

This vicious bacterial infection of the blood claims 37,000 lives a year, yet has been largely side-tracked as public attention focuses on the newer problem of superbugs – which kill 5,300.

“For Jem a vasectomy was the right thing to do.”

He underwent the operation on a Friday. Doctors advised a couple of days’ rest, but said Jem could return to work after the weekend.

“He was told it was a quick, completely routine procedure, and that there might be a bit of pain and swelling but nothing he couldn’t handle,” Karen said.

Indeed Jem, who was a director of a transport firm in Sutton Coldfield, had returned to work that Monday, but as the week progressed became ill with what the family assumed was gastric flu.

By the Thursday he was vomiting, with diarrhoea and fever, and spent the following day at home in bed. Karen called the family doctor, who recognised a post-surgical infection and prescribed antibiotics.

But it was already too late. The infection was out of control and standard antibiotics were not enough. That Saturday morning, eight days after the operation, Jem woke up delirious, with blue lips and uncontrollable diarrhoea.

They said his heart and other major organs were so damaged by the bacterial invasion that they would not sustain him. Jem died ten days after the vasectomy in March 2004.

There are fears that a new wave of infections is being caused by the so-called antibiotic-resistant superbugs like MRSA.