Health hazards shouldn't get a presumption of privacy

Ohioans have watched as a drama has unfolded across the border in Pennsylvania, where the largest outbreak of hepatitis A in the history of the nation has been recorded.
Thousands of people who ate at a Chi-Chi's Mexican restaurant in the Beaver Valley Mall have been inoculated. More than 500 cases of the disease have been reported, 10 percent of those in Ohio -- primarily in Columbiana County. Three people have died.
The public knows the name and location of the restaurant, it knows what the Pennsylvania Department of Health has been doing to pinpoint the source of the outbreak. The strong theory that green onions were the carrying agent of the disease led to green onions being pulled from all Chi- Chi's dishes and those of many other restaurants. Enough of the public knows about the theory that over-the-counter sales of the vegetable are reported down.
Perhaps the only thing good about this incident is that it happened in Pennsylvania, not Ohio. Had it happened on this side of the border, there's no telling how long the public could have been kept in the dark.
Extending secrecy
That's because just about a month ago, the Ohio legislature in its wisdom took what started out as a homeland security bill aimed at bioterrorism and turned it into a license for the Ohio Department of Health to conduct all its investigations, including food poisoning cases, in secret.
Hard lobbying by the press, consumer and environmental groups resulted in some compromises. A late amendment instructs the health department to release information when the department determines that release would mitigate or avert harm to the public. But the fact remains that giving the health department exemptions from the state's public records law was never shown to be necessary. The legislature turned the adage if it ain't broke, don't fix it on its head. In this case, the public records law wasn't broken until the health department and the legislature got their hands on it.
The legislature gave the health department the same kind of power to protect its "work product" that criminal prosecutors have. It is the prosecutor's job to bring criminals to justice and the health department's job to protect the public from such things as tainted food, hazardous chemicals and diseases. There's no reason for the health department to require secrecy as its primary tool -- except that too many bureaucrats prefer to do the public's business behind closed doors.
The legal presumption in any health department investigation should be openness. If special circumstances require secrecy, the health department should have to make its case for secrecy to a judge.
What might have been
Much of the country now knows about the Beaver Valley Chi-Chi's and the green onion link. As it happens, there were previous outbreaks of hepatitis linked to green onions in at least two other states, Georgia and Tennessee, affecting a few hundred people.
Had those cases gotten the kind of exposure we've seen in Pennsylvania, it's possible that corrective action would have been taken and loss of three lives and the expenditure of millions of dollars for treatment and investigation could have been avoided. That is a tangible benefit of running an open government.
An intangible benefit is the greater degree of trust that is earned by open governments. In the best of times, people have a healthy skepticism about government. That can quickly turn to a damaging distrust when the people see public servants taking the attitude that the public can't be trusted with the truth.
The Ohio General Assembly should revisit H.B. 6 -- for the good of politics, the people and the public health.