“. . . The danger of immediate death to ourselves took away all bowels of love, all concern for one another. I speak in general, for there were many instances of immovable affection, pity, and duty in many . . . .” Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year, 1721.
Earlier this week, The Times of London reported briefly on the plight of a former flight attendant, age 26, in Singapore.
Miraculously, the young woman has survived a brush with SARS. But she passed the virus to her parents, uncle and pastor. All three died.
As if grieving those losses from an isolation unit at Tan Tock Seng Hospital weren’t enough, the woman is now labelled a “super-spreader,” a modern-day Typhoid Mary.
More than 100 SARS cases reportedly have been traced back to her.
And her name has been flung around the world. A younger brother wrote to The Straits Times newspaper, begging for restraint.
“Could you tell your paper to stop using my sister’s name and the Health Ministry to stop calling her a super-infector?” he wrote. “It could hurt her chances of getting a job later on. Employers and other people would shun her even after she got well.”
The Times reported that even though the woman has recovered, authorities are reluctant to release her from dismal exile in a SARS hospital.
A hospital executive says she needs “great support” and is being unfairly blamed for spreading the virus. The woman had contracted SARS during a February stay at Hong Kong’s Metropole Hotel (where at least four Canadian visitors were infected with SARS), before there was any travel advisory.
It’s worth noting the woman was identified in this week’s Times story and in an Associated Press account that appeared in the online Star on April 9. (The woman’s story hasn’t been told in this newspaper so far.)
Doubtless, there are journalists who may see some public purpose in identifying the SARS survivor and giving her a human face.
But to a news ombud, it would be terribly unfair to name her now. She has broken no laws, and is being kept in a hospital for her own safety. Doesn’t a patient have some right to confidentiality in these circumstances?
Journalism, I am reminded by an old ethics textbook, has three objectives: 1) Tell the truth as much as possible; (2) Minimize harm; (3) Act independently. Minimizing harm is sometimes a hard thing for journalists to get their heads around. This is especially true when they’re dedicated to searching for and publishing the truth, first and foremost.
Tracing this vein of desirable media restraint, consider Tuesday’s story in the Star about a 31-year-old doctor, who reportedly has SARS symptoms and is a patient in isolation at Sunnybrook hospital.
The physician had been accused by Dr. Hanif Kassam, York Region’s acting medical officer of health, of having attended a funeral home while sick with SARS, potentially infecting “hundreds” of people.
Kassam didn’t identify the doctor but said he’d been “obnoxious, threatening and belligerent” when a York Region public health official delivered a Section 22 quarantine order to his hospital room.
Reporter Kevin Donovan of the Star interviewed the doctor, who said he hadn’t knowingly spread SARS despite “ludicrous” claims by York Region Public Health.
In telling the doctor’s side of the story, the Star decided not to identify him. This caused reader Stewart Kiff of Toronto to complain to the ombud that the paper should have identified the doctor.
“I find this very poor journalism,” he said by e-mail.
“The Star and other media consistently and continually ‘out’ other individuals who are alleged to have behaved in ways that damage the public good. Do you not trust your readers enough to let them judge? If you don’t trust your readers, whose side are you on?” he asked.
I readily acknowledge that when a newspaper grants too many people anonymity for frivolous reasons, it invites reader skepticism.
But in this case, the doctor had admitted himself to hospital. He was a patient whose name warranted protection (as did an unidentified nurse with SARS symptoms who rode the GO Train twice between Toronto and Appleby station).
So the doctor’s side of the story a reply to strong criticism from a public official needed to be told, even on condition of anonymity.
Had he been hit with a Section 35 order that allows police to confine uncooperative patients, subjecting them to fines of up to $5,000 a day, circumstances would have been different.
Then, I’d expect to see the man’s name announced by public health authorities and reported widely in the media as a full-fledged police-blotter item.
SARS has rattled Toronto. It’s important the media not recklessly turn fear into loathing.
