H1N1
An Iowa legislator said she wants state health officials to disclose more details about people who die in epidemics, in part to raise more awareness than ad campaigns can.
Democratic state Sen. Amanda Ragan has introduced a bill that would ease restrictions on information the Iowa Department of Public Health could release during disease outbreaks, such as the H1N1 flu epidemic, the Des Moines Register reported Jan. 21.
Iowa kept a tighter rein on information than some states did. Early in the outbreak, for example, the public health department described two victims as “adult males from eastern Iowa.”
Officials wouldn’t say which counties the men were from, how old they were, when they died or why they might have been susceptible to complications from the disease. In a few cases, the department didn’t list the victim’s gender.
As the epidemic grew, the department listed counties for victims, and it said most of them had “risk factors” that increased their chances of flu complications, but it gave few other details.
Public health administrators said at the time that a state law banned them from releasing more information.
Ragan’s proposal says the law “shall not be construed to prevent the disclosure of the county of residence, health condition, sex and approximate age of a person infected with a reportable disease.”
Ragan, the chairwoman of the Senate Human Resources Committee, said she shares health officials’ desire to shield the identity of disease victims.
“We don’t want to talk about who it is. Privacy is still critical,” she said.
However, Ragan said, Iowans might take disease outbreaks more seriously if they knew more details about the victims. Release of such information could do more to raise public awareness than health officials’ ad campaigns do, she said.
