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Our understanding of sepsis has developed over history. Since its use by the Ancient Greeks, originally meaning to decay or rot, the term “sepsis” came to be understood through the development of germ theory in the 19th century. With scientific and medical progress toward the 20th century we have begun to realise that the human response to infection is as much to blame as the pathogen itself (Namas et al, 2011). Thus death due to infection, or alternatively, death due to severe sepsis, is “one of the world’s oldest killers” and yet until relatively recently, also one of the most poorly understood