After spending days refusing to respond to the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette's efforts to learn more about the contaminants in West Virginia's water, a CDC official acknowledged Wednesday that “government officials could have moved more quickly in issuing an advisory that pregnant women drink only bottled water” and “could have communicated the uncertainties more carefully,” according to Gazette reporter Ken Ward Jr.
The update on the West Virginia situation comes from Felice J. Freyer, a medical writer for the Providence (R.I.) Journal and the vice chair of the Right to Know Committee of the Association of Health Care Journalists. After my first post, I asked Freyer and Right to Know Committee chair Irene Wielawski whether they could provide any background on similar problems with the CDC. Medical writers have expressed frustration with the CDC for decades for its public-affairs bureaucracy and its unresponsiveness. Many of my colleagues and I have found CDC doctors and scientists to be well informed and personable–excellent sources of information for news stories and for the public. But getting through the CDC's public affairs office to reach such experts is often daunting and sometimes impossible.
Freyer and Wielawski told me they did not have any documentation backing up the CDC's lack of responsiveness, but they emailed my Jan. 16 post on the West Virginia problems to the assistant secretary of public affairs for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, and asked for action to overcome the impasse between the CDC and the Gazette. The letter was referred to a press officer who acknowledged that the CDC had been "slow to recognize the 'urgency'" of getting word to the public.
Really? The CDC has a corps of epidemiologists with bags packed for urgent trips to anywhere on the globe that a health emergency might arise. Urgency is what the CDC is all about. To say the CDC is slow to recognize urgency is like saying the fire department is slow to recognize smoke. A critical component of public health is getting information to the public–urgently–to help control health emergencies, to prevent panic, and to win the trust of the people affected by an epidemic or by environmental contamination.
Even after this exchange between AHCJ and the government, reporters continued to have problems getting access. Freyer reports that the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists wrote a joint letter on Monday to the CDC's director, Tom Frieden, who had refused to speak to the Gazette when one of Ward's colleagues reached him at home last week. On Wednesday, a CDC expert, Vikas Kapil, chief medical officer for the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health, finally spoke to the Gazette. He was the official who acknowledged that the government could have moved more quickly and communicated the uncertainties more clearly.
Also on Wednesday, the CDC's director of public affairs, Barbara Reynolds, replied to the letter from the SEJ and the SPJ, saying the CDC officials "commit to examining our processes to fulfill our commitment to good public health."
I'd be delighted to see the agency improve its public relations, but I seem to recall it's made such promises before. And any such promises didn't help the Charleston Gazette.
Freyer urges AHCJ members who have problems with the CDC to contact her (felice.freyer@cox.net) or Wielawski (imw@cloud9.net) to let them know.
It's nice to see AHCJ, SEJ, and SPJ standing up for their members. It's distressing that the Gazette couldn't get a straight answer until they did.
-Paul Raeburn
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