Is blood poisoning the same as sepsis?

Yes: Many people refer to sepsis as "blood poisoning". It means that bacteria and/or fungi have invaded the blood stream allowing them to travel to many internal organs like the heart or the brain. If untreated a person with this condition may go into septic shock. Antibiotic treatment is needed to treat this condition along with careful monitoring in the hospital.

Not always: "septicemia" is an old-fashioned term that means the same thing as "blood poisoning." sepsis is the body's generalized inflammatory state to an infection. The inciting infection could be a pneumonia or a bladder infection, and may not involve bacteria in the bloodstream ("bacteremia"). In almost half of sepsis cases, there is never a positive culture that definitively pinpoints the infection.