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 …”
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.
Journalists to provide input in talks on information released in public health emergencies
Filed under: Health journalism, Public health, Public records
Local, state and federal health officials from around the country will gather Friday with journalists to start developing guidelines on how much information health officials should release about deaths during a public health emergency or outbreak.
The meeting springs from concerns that AHCJ raised last year about the wide variations in the type of information disclosed when people died from H1N1.
Health officials in some states revealed such details as age and town of residence. Others merely acknowledged that someone somewhere had died. The discrepancies became the topic of news reports and may have led to public distrust of health authorities.
AHCJ approached the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which agreed to sponsor a meeting. ASTHO invited representatives from the federal government, state health departments, county and municipal health departments, and public information officers, along with AHCJ. Fifteen people are expected to participate.
At the meeting, to be held at ASTHO headquarters in Crystal City, Va., participants plan to discuss the reasons for withholding and releasing certain types of information, and will try to agree on guiding principles for health officers as they face such decisions in the future.
“We are grateful to ASTHO for organizing and hosting this meeting,” said Charles Ornstein, AHCJ president. “We hope that it will lead to establishing minimum standards for what information should be released during public health emergencies or outbreaks, and that will result in better information for the public when it is most needed.”
AHCJ will be represented by Ornstein; Felice J. Freyer, AHCJ Right to Know Committee chair; and Rose Hoban of North Carolina Public Radio. Dr. Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for preparedness and response, is scheduled to attend, and Gretchen Michael, ASPR director of communications, will lead the discussion.
Have you been denied information from your local or state health department during an outbreak or emergency? AHCJ wants to know so these issues can be raised during the meeting. Send your stories to felice.freyer@cox.net.
HHS, CDC campaign to encourage flu vaccinations
The Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control are ramping up the campaign for flu vaccinations, judging by the subject lines in my e-mail.
At noon ET on Tuesday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius; Howard Koh, M.D., M.P.H., HHS assistant secretary for health; and Anne Schuchat, M.D., director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease; will convene for a webcast about the flu season.
Schuchat, in a blog post, reminds us that this year, the CDC recommends that everyone older than 6 months get vaccinated.
You might remember that H1N1 seemed to hit pregnant woman especially hard during the last flu season. So HHS joined with a number of medical organizations for a letter to pregnant women explaining that getting vaccinated is “safe during any trimester” and can protect women and their babies from the flu.
Members of AHCJ can see eight PowerPoint presentations from the CDC’s two-day influenza briefing in August, including information on how the agency tracks influenza and information about the vaccine.
Journalists visit CDC to learn latest about flu
Filed under: Government, Health journalism, Public health
Fourteen journalists, sponsored by AHCJ, are wrapping up a two-day workshop at the CDC about covering influenza. The workshop included a series of on-the-record sessions with CDC experts to prepare front-line journalists for the upcoming flu season. Public health experts are providing a primer on the flu, examine how it is being tracked, expectations for vaccines and antivirals, and what communities can do to deal with the fallout.
Speakers included CDC Director Thomas Frieden and Anne Schuchat, M.D., director, National Center for Immunization & Respiratory Diseases, as well as a number of other experts.
The AHCJ-sponsored journalists are:
- Diane Chun , health and science writer, The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun
- Tom Corwin, science and medicine reporter, The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle
- Dawn Davis, writer, Caribbean Today
- Dana Felty, features reporter, Savannah (Ga.) Morning News
- Karen Garloch, medical writer, The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer
- Joe Goldeen, health-care reporter, The (Stockton, Calif.) Record
- Nina Hemphill Reedern, health and fitness editor, Upscale Magazine
- Sandy Kleffman, health care reporter, Contra Costa Times/Bay Area News
- Valerie Lego, health reporter, WZZM-Grand Rapids, Mich.
- Andy Miller, independent journalist, Atlanta
- Sonia Morgan, assistant editor, CN Media
- Shanderia Posey, healthscene editor, The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger
- Cynthia Roby, journalist, South Florida Times
- Olivier Uyttebrouck , health/general assignment reporter, Albuquerque Journal/Albuquerque Publishing Co.
Some of the journalists have already written about the seminar and they all will take what they learned this week home to help them report on influenza for their local readers and viewers.
- Flu vaccine no longer just for “high risk” groups, Dana Clark Felty, Savannah (Ga.) Morning News
- CDC: Flu vaccine development needs to improve, Valerie Lego, health reporter, WZZM-Grand Rapids, Mich. Lego has been tweeting from the seminar.
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.
BMJ wants raw data for all drug trials to be shared
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Pharmaceuticals, Public records
Under the headline “We want raw data, now,” BMJ editor Fiona Godlee recounts the story of how BMJ had to pressure a drug company into releasing full study reports verifying their claims as to the effectiveness of oseltamivir (Tamiflu).
Godlee says that researchers updating their Cochrane review of the drug “failed to verify claims, based on an analysis of 10 drug company trials, that oseltamivir reduced the risk of complications in healthy adults with influenza. These claims have formed a key part of decisions to stockpile the drug and make it widely available.”
Only after Roche was questioned by the BMJ and Channel 4 News did the manufacturer commit to making “full study reports” available. Godlee says that some questions remain, including how patients were recruited and why some neuropsychiatric adverse events were not reported.
Godlee argues that “it can’t be right that the public should have to rely on detective work by academics and journalists to patch together the evidence for such a widely prescribed drug,” saying that “Individual patient data from all trials of drugs should be readily available for scientific scrutiny.”
GAO: Flu-fighting plan needs better measures
The United States Government Accountability Office today released the catchily titled “Monitoring and Assessing the Status of the National Pandemic Implementation Plan Needs Improvement” report. See the highlights here.
It does not specifically address the response to the H1N1 pandemic but instead reviews compliance with the Homeland Security Council’s 2006 “Implementation Plan for the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza.” The GAO analyzed 60 randomly selected action items from the 324 recommended in the report and sought to measure both how the completion of those items was monitored and how many had actually been completed.
The GAO found that while the Homeland Security Council had reported that the majority of the action items were complete in 2008, it was “difficult to determine the actual status of some of the 49 designated as complete.” To rectify this, the GAO recommended that “future progress reports would benefit from using measures of performance that are more consistent with the action items’ descriptions.”
Hoban reports on uneven H1N1 death disclosure
Filed under: Health data, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public health
WUNC reporter and AHCJ member Rose Hoban put together a story about uneven disclosure of H1N1 deaths by public health officials and the possible benefits and risks of providing more information. In the end, Hoban reported, it comes down to balancing individual privacy and the public interest.
On the official side, Hoban spoke to Megan Davies, M.D., North Carolina’s epidemiologist, who referred to the lack of a “compelling public health need” to provide H1N1 death data on a county-by-county level, pointing out that in many areas it would be easy for locals to take that information, match it with recent death records and come up with the name of the infected person. Davies said that, in cases like that, she fears the infected person’s family would be stigmatized.
“The fear of contagion’s a really primitive thing that comes up in people,” Davies said.
Additionally, Hoban says, officials are bound by medical ethics, state laws and federal health privacy regulations (which, she notes, generally don’t cover people who are already dead).
For another perspective, Hoban spoke with AHCJ board member Felice Freyer of The Providence Journal. Freyer discussed AHCJ’s report that disclosure had been uneven across the country, and said that officials should share information unless there’s a compelling reason not to.
“Public health officials can’t do their job if they don’t have the trust of the public and no-ones going to trust them if they hide information for no reason,” Freyer said.
Former CDC lead legal counsel Gene Matthews agreed, noting that “Too little information can be a bigger headache than too much.” According to Matthews, this problem has been exacerbated by the Internet where, “If the public health officials don’t provide enough information, the outsiders will simply make it up.”
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