Surgery fires: They happen more often than you think!

The American Society of Anesthesiologists is getting ready to do something this fall that it has never done before: issue guidelines aimed at preventing surgery fires. Who knew that there are 50 to 100 surgery fires each year, and of those fires 20% of the patients are severely burned and disfigured while 1 or 2 unfortunate souls die as a result? Of all the things that come to mind when thinking "things that can go wrong during surgery" having the surgical area and patient burst into flames isn't one of them. But it happens, and it happens often enough that there are going to be standards to help reduce the odds. That's scary.