Alice Dreger, a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, writes for Pacific Standard Magazine about the public health threat caused by public officials who censor news, fail to respond to press queries or prevent health agency employees from speaking to journalists without a representative from the press office.
Dreger points to the current Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) crisis, referring to a piece in Wired by AHCJ board member Maryn McKenna. But she also reminds us that it was journalists who sounded the alarms about the dangers of thalidomide and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, not to mention the journalists who pushed for more public awareness of AIDS when the Reagan administration was limiting the response to the emerging disease.
Efforts by AHCJ’s Right to Know Committee to lower the barriers to health information and health officials are noted in the article, as well as the advocacy done by individual AHCJ members such as Rose Hoban of North Carolina Health News and Kathryn Foxhall, a D.C.-based independent journalist.
Felice J. Freyer and Irene M. Wielawski, co-chairs of the Right to Know Committee, assert that:
“Communication is essential to public health.” They point out that “the average American pays for the work that government agencies do, is affected by the decisions they make, and deserves to know how those decisions are arrived at. This is especially important with public health agencies, whose actions determine which drugs people take, whether their food supply is safe, how much their doctors are paid, the medical quality standards that health care providers must adhere to, and a host of other issues with direct impact on day-to-day life.”
Read more about how the Right to Know Committee advocates for more access to information for journalists and the public.
