Virus attack at London hospitals

Three hospitals in London are reported to shut down their entire computer network due to the infection by a variant of Mytob worm. The hospitals that are subjected to attack are St Bartholomew's (also known as Barts) in the City, the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel and The London Chest Hospital in Bethnal Green. Some sources reports that these attacks are completely avoidable.
The virus infects the windows applications and spread itself to all the e-mail address of the infected computers. The hospitals have reported that the incident has affected the well being of the patients. There was no evidence in relation to the attacks on the safety of the patients. The manual systems have been implemented for the purpose of the restoring the computer services with top priority given to the patient service.
The trust says that they have used anti virus software and it was updated daily. But it was wrongly configured in some computers. This left open a back door through which the Mytob rapidly infiltrated the trust's network of 4,700 PCs. Anti-virus software companies have known about Mytob since 2005. Theatre operations were postponed, though they were immediately restored. Staff deferred patient appointments as doctors were unable to make safe and effective clinical decisions because they could not access diagnostic results on computers.

You will get more information from
http://www.bartsandthelondon.org.uk/formedia/press/release.asp?id=2054&sid=10
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/01/28/234477/virus-attack-at-london-hospitals-was-entirely-avoidable.htm