The latest story on the threat of superbug infections in UK hospitals highlights how risk-reducing technology, in this case antibiotics, shifts a problem over the long term and at the same time creates a behavioural change offsetting the benefits the technological innovation offers. It is the Volvo syndrome. The driver with a safer car, or who wears a seatbelt or crash helmet, drives faster or more dangerously reintroducing the risk his safety equipment has removed.

The reports today show how hygiene standards have fallen over the past generation. It seems that antibiotics may have played two roles in the superbug problem. They reduced the need in the short-term for old fashioned devotion to cleanliness (arduous, time consuming, and therefore expensive). At the same time, their widespread and often indiscriminate use over the long term has reduced both their overall effectiveness, while allowing for the creation of much stronger bacterial organisms.

The Volvo syndrome is nothing new. But in any discussions of risk, it should be invoked whenever we are encouraged to take our eye of the ball, because someone else, or some piece of technology is there to facilitate this. Very often, decisions are made on the basis of cost and backside covering, so are very short term.

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