A new study has revealed that each year, about 48,000 Americans die because of infections they caught while in the hospital, and that is just a conservative estimate.

Study's lead researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, PhD, MPH, a senior fellow at the Washington, D. C. think tank Resources for the Future, stressed that the killers are not actually the infections that people have caught, but mistakes that are made later.

"It is a staggering number and one that does not have to be. When a patient goes to the hospital for another illness and dies of pneumonia, it does not always occur to the family that it was a mistake. But if that same patient went to the hospital and got blood tainted with HIV, the response would be quite different", he said.

Numbers say that infection acquired at hospitals end up killing three times more Americans than HIV does, and yet, there are is little seriousness surrounding the issue.

To reach at the study's conclusion, researchers scrutinized data from a large-scale national database of information of hospital records for 69 million Americans across 40 states from 1998 to 2006.

Details of the study have been published in the February 22 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.