Antivirus Scan Shut Down A Medical Device In the Middle Of Heart Surgery

In theory, antivirus software is designed to keep users safe from their own mistakes. Who among us hasn’t occasionally visited a dodgy website or downloaded a dubious file? But while they can help counteract our carelessness, we still need to be careful about the ways we use them. That’s a lesson that one hospital recently learned the hard way when a medical device crashed in the midst of heart surgery. On investigation, it turned out that the culprit was the antivirus program on a computer to which the device was connected.