Journalists discuss reporting from the heart of a pandemic
Filed under: Europe, Government, Health journalism, Public health
Recently, New York Times health and science reporter Donald McNeil joined the National Journal’s Maggie Fox, the Nieman Foundation’s Stefanie Friedhoff and the Canadian Press’ Helen Branswell on a Global Journalist radio panel to discuss reporting on international pandemics and global diseases. The full episode is available to download, listen or watch online.
Host David Reed
McNeil provided his take on everything from what he packed to keep himself safe from SARS to his take on the accuracy of the movie “Contagion,” but his most relevant thoughts for AHCJ readers were in response to questions about sourcing and a journalist’s obligations in an outbreak situation.
GJ: What are some of the ways you, as a journalist, verify the information you receive, and where do you get that information?
McNeil: … it all depends on the disease. But generally, you get fairly accurate, careful information out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. There are times when you aren’t happy with the information you are getting or the decisions they make, but most of the time, I think they are both extremely careful science-driven organizations.
GJ: In reporting on the potential danger of flu and warning people to stay vigilant, are you ever concerned that some reports from the media might cause panic among people?
McNeil: I don’t see my job as being a public health official; I see my job as a journalist. So my job is to tell the truth, and the truth is basically the one goddess I serve. Obviously, people care about this stuff, so in the same way another journalist who covers the White House wants to tell people accurately what the president did or didn’t do yesterday and what it means, I am trying to tell my audience how dangerous the virus is if it’s a virus, and how many people are killed, and what can be done about it. My job is telling the truth and getting the news out.
Guidelines for releasing information in public health crisis still in the works
Filed under: Health journalism, Health policy, Public health, Public records
When North Carolina officials recently announced the death of a teenager as a result of the flu but gave out little other information, reporter Rose Hoban, R.N., of North Carolina Public Radio, had a sense of deja vu. Hoban is a member of AHCJ’s Right to Know Committee, which has dealt with exactly this issue.
Some background:
During the H1N1 pandemic, reporters found a wide variation in what information local and state health officials were disclosing about H1N1 deaths. As a result, representatives of AHCJ, including Hoban, met with health officials representing the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the group agreed on flexible guidelines specifying what information should be released about victims in a public health crisis.
Last week, Hoban filed an update about the issue on her blog with comments from Gene Matthews, who is a senior fellow at the North Carolina Institute of Public Health and was the lead counsel for the CDC for 25 years. She also checked with ASTHO about the status of the draft guidelines and was told, “I don’t think it’s going to disappear, fall into oblivion …”
PEJ: 2010 saw less coverage of health care
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism, Health policy
Every year, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism breaks down news coverage by topic and medium, then determines what percentage of the news hole each topic filled in a given calendar year (more on methodology here). Spurred by politics-oriented reform coverage and the H1N1 pandemic, health had dominated the news in late 2009 and early 2010, but by year’s end it had fallen behind the economy (14 percent), the mid-term elections (10 percent) and the BP oil spill (7 percent).
Interestingly, it seems that as the supply dropped, public demand for health coverage was actually surging. April’s health care debate ranked behind only the BP oil spill in Pew’s list of events for which public interest exceeded media coverage. Health was also one of many subjects which ranked in the top five in blogs and traditional media, but couldn’t even crack the top 10 on Twitter. For the record, Twitter’s four favorite topics were Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook, in that order.
Lack of vaccination, awareness worsen UK flu season
Filed under: Europe, Government, Hot Health Headline, Public health
The Guardian’s Denis Campbell and Sarah Boseley report that a drop in vaccination rates and a lack of public awareness has made this flu season worse than it should have been, and that there is potential for the NHS to be “inundated” with flu cases. The story has spread quickly in the UK, and may be providing just the sort of public awareness campaign that the reporters found was previously lacking.
Professor Steve Field, who until last month was the chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, spoke out as the Department of Health revealed there are more than 300 people in critical care beds with flu and 17 people have died.
Field said the decision not to encourage the public to have a jab to protect themselves was “ill-advised” and needed to be urgently reversed.
The NHS should have acted more decisively to encourage people to have the jab because it was known that H1N1 swine flu was still circulating and that few NHS staff had the swine flu vaccine when it was offered to them late last year.
Related
For more European health news, see AHCJ’s Covering Europe initiative.
Officials, journalists agree information key in public health crisis
When the H1N1 pandemic first hit in the fall or 2009, every sickness and every death was of great interest to the public. Anxiety ran high; people wanted to know how this new illness was affecting their communities. In some places, public health officials released considerable information about the victims. In others, however, they revealed little or nothing.
That may change soon, thanks to a “cooperative effort between AHCJ’s Right to Know Committee and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, aimed at establishing flexible guidelines on how much information to reveal about victims in a public health crisis.
At AHCJ’s request, ASTHO hosted a meeting on Oct. 8 at which reporters and health officials hashed out their concerns and reached common ground. The daylong meeting at ASTHO headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., was attended by health officials from the D.C. area as well from Alabama, Michigan, Rhode Island and two federal agencies. A state health official also participated by speaker phone from Tennessee. AHCJ was represented by journalists Charles Ornstein, Rose Hoban and Felice Freyer.
Health officials readily accepted the premise that openness is essential to maintain public trust, said Freyer, who chairs the Right to Know Committee. But they explained their worries about what the media might do (and have done) with the information released, such as scouring obituaries to deduce who died and distressing families by showing up at funerals. AHCJ agreed to advise its members that it is unethical to violate victims’ privacy without permission. Read more …
FOI request for H1N1 documents still pending
Filed under: Health journalism, Public health, Public records
Eleven months after she filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for documents related to H1N1, CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson reports that she has finally received a response from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
It states that it has a certain document responsive to my FOI request. The letter says HHS will try really hard to provide the document soon, but that the folks there are very busy so it may take awhile. It says that if I want expedited processing - something I had already applied for a year ago - I should let them know. A phone number was provided in case I had any questions.
Of course the investigative report I was working on is long over, as the bureaucrats must have known it would be by now.
Attkisson says she called the number provided in the letter and left a message several weeks ago and has yet to hear back. Her initial request was prompted by the CDC’s decision to stop testing and tracking H1N1, something her sources told her was hasty and more about influencing the public’s perception of the illness than it was about public health.
Earlier: Freedom of Information: Stalled at CDC and D.C. Government (Oct. 27, 2009)
Related
- Health journalists cite uneven disclosure of H1N1 deaths across country
- AHCJ calls on new administration to improve access to federal experts
In reversal, Mich. agency releases H1N1 documents
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Public health, Public records
Michigan’s Department of Community Health has reversed an earlier decision to withhold documents about how the state has spent money on H1N1 prevention.
Todd A. Heywood of the Michigan Messenger reports the department had turned down a Freedom of Information Act request from that publication for “information related to a $25,000 budget item for the involvement of the Civilian Air Patrol. It also refused to release information about an exercise which was budgeted at nearly $50,000 and refused to identify which ‘partner agencies’ had received gloves, masks and other supplies purchased by the department.”
In its denial, the department said releasing the information would violate the state’s anti-terrorism laws. Heywood reports the documents that have been released do not appear to have any relationship to terrorism or national security.
“It’s absurd to think that releasing plans for preventing and treating H1N1 would compromise the state’s security or increase its vulnerability to terrorism,” said Charles Ornstein, president of AHCJ’s board of directors and a senior reporter at ProPublica.
“I’m pleased the Michigan Department of Community Health released the requested documents, and I hope reporters in other states will ask for similar information.”
AHCJ has been concerned about the withholding of information about H1N1 around the country. Last fall, an informal poll of AHCJ members and a review of press releases and news reports revealed a wide variation in what information local and state health officials are disclosing about H1N1 deaths.
At the time, Felice Freyer, chair of AHCJ’s Right-to-Know Committee, said, “in some places, officials are withholding more information than necessary, perhaps because of a lack of clear guidelines about what should be revealed. This comes at a high cost; health officials lose the public’s trust when they hide information. Anyone may wonder: If they won’t even say how old the victim was, what else are they concealing about the sicknesses affecting my community?”
After being approached by AHCJ, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers agreed to organize a group of state officials, public information officers and health-care writers to develop guidelines on reporting deaths that are of concern or interest to the public. We will learn more details soon, says Freyer, a reporter at The Providence (R.I.) Journal, but “we are happy that ASTHO agrees the issue is worthy of discussion and intends to include us.”
In California, Ryan Sabalow of the Redding (Calif.) Record Searchlight put together a local take on ongoing inconsistencies in how local health departments release outbreak-related information to the public. He wrote about examples from local health departments and explained the nuances of when and how certain health departments choose to disclose infections, and how inconsistent those standards can be in practice.
(Hat tip to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.)
Officials struggle with timing of outbreak alerts
Filed under: Government, Health data, Health journalism, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline, Public health, Public records
The Redding (Calif.) Record Searchlight’s Ryan Sabalow put together a local take on ongoing inconsistencies in how local health departments release outbreak-related information to the public.
Sabalow brings the story home with examples from local health departments and the story of a child who died from bacterial meningitis in an area where a previous case had gone unannounced. In the first story, Sabalow explains the nuances of when and how certain health departments choose to disclose infections, and in the second he shows just how messy and inconsistent those standards can be in practice.
At issue is the struggle to find a balance between transparency and panic-causing cries of “wolf.” It’s an issue AHCJ has tackled before, most notably during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak when disclosure varied wildly from department to department.
Felice J. Freyer, a health reporter at the Providence Journal in Rhode Island who heads the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Right to Know Committee, said a perception of secrecy is the last thing health officials need when they’re urging people to take steps to protect themselves from a disease.
“You can’t sustain the public’s trust if you run and hide,” Freyer said. “That’s what it looks like, whether that’s what’s happening or not.”
Freyer said AHCJ members have been in talks with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. The nonprofit health organization has agreed to meet with the AHCJ to determine whether a nonbinding set of national guidelines can be developed.
Somewhere at the other end of the spectrum is Dr. Rob Hamilton, head of a Redding hospital’s emergency department.
Hamilton said he empathizes with public health officials in holding back until a case is confirmed.
One false alarm about a suspected meningitis case could potentially flood an already crowded emergency medical system with dozens of scared patients who don’t have meningitis but are demanding expensive, potentially dangerous and time-consuming spinal taps, he said.
Related
Kim Archer of the Tulsa World has been covering an outbreak of meningitis that has killed two children and made at least five others sick. She talked to school and health officials about the public health response to the outbreak and compiled a timeline of the outbreak and response.
Fluportal.org: Postmortem of a temporary resource
Fluportal.org, a Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded site built to help public media cover H1N1 and related issues, has completed its grant and will stop updating at the end of this month.
As a fitting capstone to a very well-executed and valuable resource, the staff has posted an exhaustive, honest review of what the site did, where things went right and where they went wrong. It’s a lengthy read, but one that gives insight into how best to organize and execute a health-related, issue-oriented Web resource.
Other resources on the site look into health reporting and how to communicate information about H1N1 to the public:
- Was H1N1 Info Communicated Well to the Public?
- How WBUR’s Sacha Pfeiffer Reports on H1N1
- Can Health Reporting Weather the Economic Storm
Canadian workshop examines H1N1 coverage
The H1N1 pandemic was a unique event, with developments unfolding quickly, leading to communication problems about the crisis, according to a speaker at a workshop in Montreal last week.
The Concordian, the student newspaper at Concordia University in Montreal, reports that the university’s departments of journalism and exercise science hosted a workshop on “Politics of Health Information: Reflections on a Pandemic.”
Dr. Simon Bacon, from Concordia’s department of exercise science, participated in the 2nd Annual Health Communication Workshop and said, “This was something that happens very rarely and it was going so fast that there were communication problems between each level.”
A report on how to improve communication between scientists and journalists is expected to be completed and posted online in about two months.
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