Any rogue state that killed 7,000 Americans a year would soon be on the sharp end of some Pentagon ordnance. Doctors, it seems, get away with it. The figure is an official estimate of the death toll each year from "adverse drug events" - what happens when patients receive the wrong drug or the wrong dose.
No figures are available for Britons killed by incompetent prescribing. However, experts say that the US experience suggests 180,000 British hospital patients a year are subjected to "unnecessary mistakes in medication". According to government auditors, the number of deaths attributed to medication errors is rising. These mistakes already cost the NHS £500 million a year, the Audit Commission reported in 2001.
Children are at particular risk. Their drug doses are calculated by body weight, and doctors not used to procedures can get it wrong. A decimal point in the wrong place can multiply a drug dose by 10, 100 or even 1,000 times.
There is a proven better way. Rather than relying on hospital doctors to write by hand on paper, the NHS could require them to do prescribe electronically. Apart from reducing errors - doctors' handwriting is no joke when it kills people - IT systems can be set up to warn doctors that they are writing a recipe for a lethal dose.
Trials of such systems have shown they cut the number of prescribing errors by more than half.
In the US, concerns about the cost of error - one doctor has already been sued for $450,000 after his bad handwriting caused a death - have encouraged some states to ban handwritten prescriptions. Washington State is planning such a ban by 2005.
What of the NHS? Remarkably, British hospitals have been testing electronic prescribing for more than 10 years. Three trusts - Wirral, Winchester and Burton - pioneered the technology in the mid-1990s.
In 1998, the NHS set a target for every hospital to prescribe electronically by 2005. Since then, however, progress has been dismal. According to a report in the current edition of the specialist British Journal of Healthcare Computing more than 20 hospital trusts have piloted electronic prescribing, but "none has proceeded to full implementation".
Hospital IT specialist Sean Brennan, one of the report's authors, says that the usual problem is lack of money to move beyond a pilot. An electronic prescribing system isn't much use unless it is part of a comprehensive "electronic patient record" with enough terminals to make it convenient. All this costs money. "The problem with pilots is that they don't have the resources to roll out, and so everyone considers them a failure," Brennan says.
In the NHS, there is usually a vested interest in preserving the status quo. "Sometimes, exposing existing flaws results in criticism of the modernisers," comment Brennan and co-author Alan Spours. Logging in to a terminal, even a hand-held Tablet device, takes longer than dashing off a scrip on a piece of paper. Overworked doctors resent the effort. Others are suspicious of electronic protocols telling them what they can and cannot prescribe.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel.
Electronic prescribing is part of the £2.3bn National Programme, a centrally directed effort to modernise the NHS's IT. However it is focusing mainly on electronic transmission of prescriptions between GPs (who unlike their hospital colleagues do usually work on computers) and pharmacies. Here, the aim is to cut fraud and the cost of handling half a billion paper prescriptions every year.
Electronic processes have been tested in three pilot schemes. A spokesperson for the National Programme said this week: "An evaluation of technical, patient, GP and pharmacy issues has been carried out. Armed with this information we can now consider the next steps." The project is also awaiting policy decisions on issues ranging from confidentiality to the business implications for independent chemists' shops.
E-prescribing in hospitals may be further down the track. Under the National Programme, it will be a component of a system called the Integrated Care Records Service, which will begin to go live by geographic region from next year. Electronic prescribing will not be possible in every hospital until perhaps 2007: no date has even been considered for making it compulsory. In the meantime, hospitals that want to duck the issue have an excuse to do nothing.
All this is frustrating for enthusiasts. "We know that electronic prescribing works," says Brennan, "We shouldn't be piloting, we should be implementing." But the whole story is a reminder that, although computerising the NHS will cost money, doing nothing will in the long run cost more.
