Hospitals in Michigan nearly eliminated often-deadly infections involving tubes that deliver fluids and medicine to patients by stressing better hygiene and other preventive steps, a U.S. study showed.

The catheters cause about 80,000 bloodstream infections per year in the United States, infections so serious that up to 28,000 of the patients die. Fighting the infections costs about $2.3 billion annually.

Hoping to reverse that trend, 108 intensive care units in the state of Michigan joined a project launched in October 2003 that included procedures designed to reduce infection - from better hand-washing to special cleaning and insertion procedures to removing unnecessary catheters when possible.

At the start of the study, there were 27 infections for every 10,000 days a catheter was in place, said the team led by Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

After three months, the rate had dropped to zero. It stayed that low for the remaining 15 months of the study.

“All types of participating hospitals realized a similar improvement,” the researchers said in the study to be published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.

The decline was described as “remarkable” in a Journal editorial by Richard Wenzel and Michael Edmond of Virginia Commonwealth University.

They said the techniques should be embraced by all hospitals, which tend to adopt safety practices in a scattershot manner.

“We can no longer accept the variations in safety culture, behavior or systems of practice that have plagued medical care for decades,” they said.

“Imagine the effect if all 6,000 acute care hospitals in the United States were to show a similar commitment and discipline.”