The muscular weakness from ALS leads to difficulty in swallowing which can lead to aspiration ("things going down the wrong way"). The weakness also intereferes with the forceful coughing that is Nature's way clearing things out of the lungs and the weakness of respiratory muscles can also require ventilator support with the resulting foreign object down the trachea.
As a result, ALS patients are very susceptible to pneumonia.
Once you have a pneumonia, if it gets far advanced, the infection can get into the bloodstream (sepsis) and become even more deadly than an isolated pneumonia.
So, in an ALS patient, sepsis is often a complication of a complication of ALS.
It is not my point to say that sepsis is not a serious problem.
By definition, once an infection has progessed to the sepsis stage, it has become a body-wide infection rather than a localized infection. With antibiotic abuse, all infections, especially hospital acquired infections, can potentially be extremely serious and/or fatal.
My point is to clarify the impression that the author may have left that sepsis is some Killer Disease of the Month such as SARS or Avian flu or Ebola haemorrhagic fever that a healthy person can simply "catch" by being at the wrong place at the wrong time or that Osama bin Laden can mail to you via a white powder in an envelope.
We have enough things to be paranoid about already.