Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - According to a new report released this week, nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. died from infections that they caught while in hospitals in the year 2006.

The study was reported this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, and was put together thanks to research supported by Resources for the Future.

The study focused on infections that are caught in U.S. hospitals, including blood-borne infections as well as pneumonia, and what the study found is quite scary to say the least. It was conducted by looking at discharge records from nearly 70 million patients at hospitals in 40 states in the U.S.

The work was done to look at these records from the year 1998 through 2006.

What they found was that in the year 2006, roughly 48,000 patients died from infections that they caught while in hospitals across the U.S.

Researchers were also able to put a price tag on the cost to the health care system as a whole in regards to these infections, resulting in $8.1 billion in health care expenses.

The two most common infections caught in hospitals included sepsis and pneumonia.

Those who caught these had to stay in the hospital for an extra 10 to 14 days on average.

On top of that, sepsis killed roughly 20% of its patients, while pneumonia killed over 10%.

Overall, this came out to about 50,000 deaths that could have been prevented if hospital infections were more actively attacked.

This has led to a major push to improve preventive measures that could be taken to stop these infections.

It is expected that 1.5 million hospital infections are diagnosed yearly.