‘We have taken cavalier risks with the health and lives of our medical staff’

• WE need a strategy to deal with infectious diseases beyond crisis management with its deadly consequences.

A new series of specifically designed hospitals for infectious diseases, with distinct “clean and dirty” traffic routes, totally separate from existing hospitals, is required.

We have depended on “good luck” and taken cavalier risks with the health and lives of our medical staff.

We need a parallel system of such hospitals with their own laboratories, of the correct grade, to control disease.

Only then, with proper infrastructure can the existing hospital system offer a “normal” service. Remember the “normal” NHS couldn’t cope in normal circumstances.

This system will avoid us staggering from one damaging “deadly” economic crisis to another. It has yet to be recognised that the dependence on present infrastructure will not work.

It is no solution to chuck patients out whenever their is a crisis and in effect close down the “normal” health service every time a new infectious disease rears up.

That is a death sentence for many “normal” patients. Sheer madness. The war is not over! We need new and better weapons.

FRANK DRAKE
Falkland Road, NW5