A mother's search for answers: Why public health information policies matter

This probably sounds familiar to most local health reporters.

A public health department puts out a press release about someone in their county catching a communicable disease like West Nile virus, meningitis or H1N1. The press release doesn't provide a person's age or hometown. If you're lucky, it might provide the patient's gender. A little digging reveals that the person was sickened so long ago that the news seems stale at best.

This weekend, we ran a pair of Sunday stories looking at how health departments being too vague with information or too slow can sometimes cost people dearly.

The first story takes a 10,000 foot look at the inconsistencies in the ways in which public health departments release information on a local, state and national level. I used the Association of Health Care Journalists extensively as a resource.

The second story brings it down to look at how a local woman is struggling to change her local health department's information policies after she lost a child during a meningitis outbreak in January. She believes 10-year-old Braden might still be alive had local public health officials announced that another child had been hospitalized with meningitis at least four days earlier.

I could see these types of stories springing up from time to time in any community in the country, given the lack of guidelines and health departments' insistence on secrecy.