Neighboring San Bernardino County has just declared a state of emergency over the spread of Swine Flu and here in L.A. County several dozen people have already succumbed to the same. I'd like to give you the exact figure, but the Director of the L.A. County Health Department has decided to play hard to get on the issue. For those of you who were paying attention, late last week our USC-based Neon Tommy news site (published by Annenberg Digital News where I am director)  ran a major package on the 44 deaths (or is it 52 or 78?) in L.A. County we could confirm via the review of available death certificates. But before our reporters finished the package, the health department abruptly cut off access to the death certificates. Tuesday night, our lead writer on the story, Callie Schweitzer, an already very accomplished 20 year old undergraduate, was interviewed on the local public radio show Which Way L.A.? Host Warren Olney invited Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of the county health department, to join the show and clarify the issues at hand. Most importantly, just exactly who has died from the flu and how serious a threat it is or isn't.  Our review of the death certificates revealed that it wasn't always very clear, even to the families of the victims, if the flu was or was not the cause of death. This is something that Dr. Fielding has acknowledged but he has not offered much information on how to sort through the problem. Indeed, he would not answer any of the queries from our reporters. Consistent with our previous experience, Dr. Fielding, responsible for the health of millions of Angelenos,  refused to be interviewed in the same radio segment Tuesday as reporter Schweitzer.  He agreed to come on to the show only if he could appear solo and after the interview with our reporter.  He couldn't or wouldn't take the heat from a USC student reporter?  This is not a very comforting thought and it does little to bolster faith in what we loosely call "the institutions."  I am sure the doctor is a decent and compassionate man who currently has his hands full with a major public health problem. But it seems, at a minimum, rather arrogant to not consent to enter a public dialogue with reporters who are only trying to get the basic facts. Now, reporter Schweitzer has published an open letter to Dr. Fielding politely imploring him to meet with our reporters to discuss how the media and the citizenry can judge the severity (or not) of the flu.  Seems reasonable to me (my personal interest in this aside). Here's an excerpt:

I wanted to ask you some of the remaining questions my colleagues and I have about L.A. County's response to the H1N1 epidemic: What is the process for hospitals and physicians reporting swine flu deaths?  What exactly are the 2,000 health department workers devoted to the influenza epidemic doing? What's the process for fixing death certificates so that they accurately list H1N1 after post-death tests, which can take up to eight weeks? So, yes, I was more than a little irritated when I heard Olney say Tuesday night, on air, that you had declined the invitation to converse directly with me. But I'm moving on. Consider this my formal invitation to bring three of my colleagues from Neon Tommy to your offices sometime this week for a summit meeting. We can hash out your differences with our report, which was based on the 44 death certificates for Los Angeles county residents who died from the onset of the epidemic in April through Oct. 9. In your segment you said the death toll has now reached 78 and that death certificates are not the appropriate way to gauge the nature of the virus in L.A. County. Your argument was that death certificates are "not fully accurate." I wholeheartedly agree with this fact, as 20 of the 44 swine flu death certificates issued by the county fail to mention the virus as a cause of death. Not fully accurate indeed. I'm not overly concerned with legal jargon, but I am mildly curious about why your department, midway through the project, changed its legal position on releasing death certificates. In the future,  your people told us that they would only provide us with certificates that initially list swine flu as one of the causes of death. Wouldn't that make any future reporting we do even more inaccurate, since many of the certificates initially do not blame H1N1 for the victims' deaths? This is very puzzling. Please help.

The questions being posed here are ones that are literally owed to the citizenry. The call for Dr. Fielding to be more transparent were amplified on Wednesday when the most important aggregator of local L.A. news, LAObserved, linked to Schweitzer's letter.  We'll see if the good doctor has time to meet with the media as the numbers slowly climb. P.S. This is a time, as you know, where it's quite in fashion to moan and groan over the state of a collapsing media. It's a nice way for baby boomers to fill idle time, I suppose. But I want to tell my readers about the enormous privilege I feel I have in being able to spend my days working with a new generation of reporters who have NO time to dwell in mournful nostalgia. They are way too busy doing the hard work of digging up facts, fighting for transparency, and generating information in the public interest. I want to ask you to show your support for them, at a minimum, by clicking on the button below and joining the Neon Tommy facebook fan page. It means a lot to them. And once you join, you might even want to leave them a message of encouragement.  Don't mourn. Organize. Report. And Publish.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Featured, Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.