Britain's National Health Service has been accused of giving patients diseases they didn't have when they entered hospital. Indeed, a recent survey claims that a third of British NHS wards fall below basic sanitary standards. And one study found that certain multiple-antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) abound on specific wards. In this connection, Daedalus recalls an old American remedy.

Late nineteenth-century warehouses in the United States were often infested with rats, cockroaches and bugs of all sorts. The cure was to close all the windows, and place in every room a large pellet of sodium cyanide, together with an apparatus for covering this with hot sulphuric acid. When all was ready, the operator left the building, pulling the strings which worked the apparatus in each room. The whole warehouse became a gas chamber, killing all the infesting organisms. A little while later, the windows were opened (from the outside!). Later still, the building, now free of pests, could be safely reoccupied by its human owners.

So, says Daedalus, let us adapt this technology for the NHS. Hydrogen cyanide should be readily available in cylinders or adsorbed on vermiculite, for example; other volatile agents to kill viruses, such as formaldehyde or ethylene oxide, are also freely accessible. (Formaldehyde has already been blamed for affecting people in houses whose cavity walls have been filled with urea–formaldehyde waterproof resin.) Mixtures of ethylene oxide and carbon dioxide, just as deadly to infestations but less lethal to human beings, have also been used in pest control.

The NHS patients would have to be rehoused in a day-room or vacant ward, and external fans might have to be installed to prevent gas issuing from the treated ward from inconveniencing surrounding wards or dwellings. But what worked for early Americans should also work well for the NHS. Insects, bacteria and viruses should be neatly eliminated, and patients would be safely rehoused in completely sterile surroundings.

The only snag, says Daedalus, might be the bugs left in the patients themselves. The American solution was to disinfect the warehouses at regular intervals, so that nothing nasty could build up even by mutation. Whether NHS hospitals could build such a procedure into their routine is another matter. But if patients arrive free of these infections, the problem should not arise.