 As we told you last week, sepsis is a growing problem in hospitals and medical centers around the world. Tonight, Clayton Castle tells us what sepsis is and how local medical centers are attacking it. Meet Katie McQuestion. The 26-year-old radiologist from Kenosha, Wisconsin, was in newlywed in 2014 when she began feeling ill on a Monday. By Friday, she had passed away. The cause, a clinical syndrome called sepsis, which is killing thousands of people worldwide every year. So, sepsis is a clinical syndrome, which includes some physiological, biological, and biochemical abnormalities due to dysregulated response to infection. Sepsis can develop quickly, and if not caught early, it can be very dangerous, even deadly. Once this dysregulated response is activated in your body, then you can have anything from organ failure progressing all the way to death. Or a syndrome that is fairly unknown to the general public, the numbers are staggering. But if you look worldwide, the incidence of sepsis remains somewhere around 450 cases per 100,000, which is quite a lot. And the mortality ranges anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent. So it is a devastating illness. While sepsis is hard to treat in most cases, medical centers around the area either have or are putting procedures in place to reduce the number of sepsis cases, including hiring hospitalists or general care physicians who work in the hospital and help detect infection in sepsis. There are also guidelines that hospitals must follow. And we have certain standards of care and other care pathways that make sure that certain things are done appropriately and in a timely manner. Minnesota hospitals and medical care centers are looking to reduce its own sepsis numbers throughout the land of 10,000 lakes. In 2015, sepsis was the primary cause of 439 deaths, up from 261 a decade earlier. Reporting in Brainerd, Clayton Castle, Lakeland News. In September, a $20 million lawsuit settlement was awarded to the family of a 30-year-old Maple Grove woman who died of sepsis in 2013, just days after giving birth in a Twin Cities hospital. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.