The public’s right to know

One essential part of public health is public relations. Public health experts need to keep in touch with the people and warn them about possible threats and dangers. They also need to let them know when the danger is not as great as the public thinks.

In the case of the Auckland typhoid scare, public health experts failed to keep people informed and there was unnecessary worry and concern as a result. The authorities need to take this on board and learn from it.

A 52-year-old woman with typhoid died last week, but many of her family apparently were unaware that she had it. A spokesman for the family said that many who attended her funeral days later had no idea she had the disease.

They were naturally upset because they believed that she represented a threat to those who had visited her in hospital and that these people in turn could have spread the disease further. The news that 16 people (later 18) from one particular church were affected by the disease naturally reinforced the concern. Many in the wider church community who attended the woman’s funeral were also concerned.

It was only late on Wednesday this week that the public health experts moved to reassure people that there was very little risk of contracting typhoid through normal social contact such as visiting someone in hospital.

It seems extraordinary that the family was told neither of the typhoid nor of the low risk, but that is what appears to have happened. The public health experts now say that they were unaware till the woman died that she had typhoid. They had also agreed with the family not to divulge the facts about her typhoid till after the funeral.

Even this week, when the whole controversy blew up and journalists interviewed public health experts, sometimes at length, the point about the low risk was not clearly communicated.

If it had been, the authorities’ action in not passing on the news about the typhoid would at least have been comprehensible.

However, it is still not clear why they agreed to delay the announcement that she had the disease. In this case, the privacy of the individual arguably should be sacrificed to the greater need to inform the public and to reassure it.

It compounds the problem that Health Minister Jonathan Coleman says the first he heard of the issue was when he saw it on the television. The first rule for any official is: never keep the boss in the dark, especially when it’s about something of major political and public interest.

The minister is the public face of all public health issues and so must be kept informed if he is to perform his various roles, one of which is to make the public aware of any risks or dangers.

In this case the whole system failed, and the result was unnecessary alarm and trouble. It might be true, as Coleman says, that there was no public health danger and that in that sense the officials did their job properly. But they totally failed in their other duty, which was to inform the public. - Fairfax NZ