Despite dramatic improvements in diagnostic and treatment procedures, mortality rates among patients with sepsis remained unchanged from the 1960s through to the late 1990s. Diagnostic algorithms have therefore been developed to identify at-risk populations, and professional societies have worked to implement treatment procedures that focus efforts on early intervention. The Surviving Sepsis Campaign proposed management procedures that differentiate between 'resuscitation bundles' for the first 6 hours and 'management bundles' to be applied until the end of the 24th hour [4] . These procedure recommendations have been disseminated worldwide and are focused on global improvement in practices whose primary goal it is to reduce sepsis-related death. As a consequence of the recommendations, a trend toward decreasing mortality has been observed during the past few years.