It’s rather frustrating, as a reporter, not to be able to get the age or gender, or even the hometown of the Okanogan County teenager associated with the national tomato scare. To me it’s the classic conflict between the public’s right to know, and a person’s right to privacy.
My story yesterday on salmonella was full of holes because the Okanogan County Health District would not provide basic information. It’s not just this health district. When there was an E. coli outbreak in the Lake Chelan Valley around Thanksgiving in 2006, public health officials then were also tight lipped.

It’s a challenge we face in many areas of reporting, not just health care. In this case, I do certainly understand the teenager’s right to privacy, and recognize the teen may not want his or her name splashed over local newspapers. But, given our policies on not publishing names of crime victims, it seems unlikely that we would use this person’s name without permission from the teenager and his or her parents.

And yea, I guess if you report his or her age and gender and hometown, some people might put two and two together and figure out who was contaminated. But it’s not like we’re talking about leprosy here, or AIDS. I don’t get what the stigma would be if the public knew a certain person was contaminated with salmonella. Seems to me it would elicit compassion rather than scorn.

My main concern is, what about the public’s right to know? If a grocery store or restaurant in my town sold the tomato that sickened this young person, don’t you think I should know that? This teenager did not travel outside the area before getting sick. The contamination came right here, to Okanogan County.

I guess the other thing that bothers me is, reporters across the country are being denied information about victims. Yet if we were interviewing the people who got salmonella, we could actually help track down the source of this outbreak. The New York Times reports today that the Food and Drug Administration is closer to finding the source. This is a full week after the outbreak was first tied to tomatoes. It’s after tomatoes have been pulled from grocery stores and restaurants, and the tomato industry in several states — including those that have been declared safe — are on the verge of collapse.

Across the country, the media is all over this story because it’s tied to food safety. We get paid to ask a lot of questions, we’re persistent, and we’re pretty good at solving mysteries. As an industry, newspapers are extremely careful about having proof, or confirmation from more than one source before pointing the finger at anyone. Here at The Wenatchee World, I’m nearly certain we would not be naming victims of an outbreak unless they willingly talk to us about what they experienced. I would love to know what our readers think about this right-to-know/right-to-privacy conflict.