MRSA: hyped up health scare?

Today there was a feeding frenzy of reporters at my nephew's elementary school, because a suspected case of the superbug MRSA was discovered a few days ago. His school was on the news last night, as a location where a suspected case was possibly found.

I exaggerate only a little, the evening news' penchant for blowing things out of proportion is well known. However, real questions of the common good do arise in this case.

It is a noble self defense, on the part of the media, to cite the common good and the public's right to know. But at what point does reporting that incites panic betray the public good?

Is it irresponsible of the evening news to report the case this way? I think so. My sister thought it better to know in advance, that being aware of a possible disease will keep it in check, as people will be more careful.

The media's responsibility to inform the public is not straightforward, as other competing claims

Had a good conversation with my sister about this issue this morning, she thought that the school was wrong for not advising parents preemptively. She took a straightforward utilitarian perspective, that it is better to risk public hysteria, even to betray the sick individual's privacy, in case it does turn out to

But utilitarian arguments don't work that way, do they? This argument might hold if the infection had been confirmed, but where it is a suspected case, the good of the one versus the many does not hold. This becomes a case of crying wolf, increasing vigilance and anxiety at a moment that may not be the right one.

Withholding information is not an offense in this case, because the infection was not yet confirmed.

The question at hand is the risk of public hysteria, the epidemic of misinformation.

Taking the ways of this world into account, media leaks and all, my sister might be right, but not from a utilitarian perspective. In hindsight, it would have been better to hear it from the school, rather than on the evening news.

I understand my sister's concern. Now that it was on the evening news, parents feel betrayed, because they did not know before. "I would not have been angry, if I had just been told." Classic parry, this counterfactual move, but it doesn't work on my loved ones, and I don't think it works here either.

I suspect that the school was following the impulse to avoid panic, keeping the illness quiet and waiting to release information until a diagnosis was made (self protection as much as concern for the common good, I imagine). It would have been irresponsible to release news of a suspected case before any diagnosis.

What is the right response of an institution, with information about a communicable disease on their hands? Especially given the style and tone of news reporting today, that easily lends itself to hysteria.

This 'superbug' is highly contagious, and so it is well worth knowing about. But it is most deadly to weakened patients in ICUs, or people with otherwise compromised immune systems.

Is the media acting in the public's best interest, raising anxiety about the presence of a possible contagion? Is the school acting in the community's best interest, when it sits on this kind of information?

I'm thinking about this question without even considering the individual's right to privacy, that's a thorny issue in itself - on the issue of a communicable disease, the person's right to privacy comes into conflict with the common good, doesn't it?

In another train of thought, I also started wondering how this scare might play out in the news.

A couple years ago, living in Brussels, the BBC was my main source of news in English. MRSA was all over the place! There, questions of responsibility and the common good are more in the forefront, I suppose, since healthcare is nationalised and the BBC is a state sponsored news outlet. However, privately owned media are the tides that toss public opinion this way and that, so there may be some similarities.

In the UK, MRSA scares a couple years ago caused doctors and nurses to be more careful about hand washing. Interestingly enough, this led to a change in dress code, discouraging doctors from wearing ties, as they are not washed as often, therefore carrying more infectious agents.

Here, the currents of public opinion and mainstream news media's appetite for hysteria will toss this story around for a bit. It'll be interesting to see where it lands, if it does (instead of just fading).

In the UK, this health scare put the national health service in the spotlight, raising a broad array of questions about its efficiency and quality (and, of course, Conservative accusation that healthcare should be privatised). Generally, as I see it, this led to more attention to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics, more attention to practical ways that we can keeping the contagion in check, more hand washing stations, for example. But, in hindsight, over the two or three years that MRSA was in the news, it did draw attention to serious issues in the NHS (National Health Service) and spur helpful changes.

Having watched the MRSA scare unfold on the British news, I am curious to see what will happen here.

Who are the actors in this story, who stands to gain? I'm having a Malcolm Gladwell moment, wondering if this issue might cause attention to healthcare to reach a tipping point. Healthcare has been in the news lately after all, and it is election season or, as the Daily Show calls it, a "clusterf**k to the White House."

Will public opinion, and the electorate, follow where bacteria lead?