Medical Errors Are Leading Killer After Heart Disease and Cancer, Study Finds
Mistakes cost a quarter of a million lives a year in the U.S., Johns Hopkins reports, up from famous estimate of 100,000 in 1999.
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After heart disease and cancer, medical errors kill more Americans than anything else, claiming a quarter of a million lives a year, according to a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
If bungles and safety lapses in the hospital were accounted for as deaths from disease and injury are, they would be the third most common cause of death in the U.S., leading to more fatalities than respiratory disease, the report in the British Medical Journal argues.