By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
Meet Elmer Glenn Hesselgrave, the somewhat cantankerous editor of the Star Herald News, published in Norwalk the first half of the 20th century.
Hesselgrave (you will hear more about him in the County Line in the coming weeks) found himself in a wave of controversy after he sharply criticized the Norwalk Village Board for not complying with state instructions to quarantine during the horrendous flu epidemic of 1919, which took millions of lives.
Hesselgrave ranted in his newspaper, “The health officer has told us time and again that proper precautions were not being taken, that the situation was rotten but he could not get others to act.”
He suggested the board get “a little backbone,” as conditions were as bad as they could be.
“The quarantine is being forgotten altogether. We still permit public gatherings, even public funerals, when we are told that influenza is a crowd disease.”
Evidently some on the board suggested Hesselgrave’s fervor was based more on self-interest: He would get the job of printing quarantine cards. Ah, yes, politics, even then.
Hesselgrave was a man after my own heart. Right next to his column that chastises the Norwalk Village Board, he printed two obituaries: one for 62-year-old Mrs. Godfred Butzler of St. Mary’s Ridge, and the other, for the 3-year-old daughter of the Charles Arndts. Both were flu victims.
For as long we’ve had infectious disease, humanity has struggled with how we cope with it. The unfortunate victims have been subjected to isolation (think Leper colonies) and all manner of cruelty. As recently as 25years ago, AIDS victims were shunned and, in many cases, they lost their jobs and homes and were rejected by their families. Even children such as Ryan White, who acquired AIDS through a blood transfusion, were driven from public school, and they and their families were terrorized and threatened. In those days, privacy regarding illness was scant. Whatever plagued you was likely to be well-known to the community.
Then came the age of electronic records. All of the data about your health was no longer buried in a clinic’s file cabinet, but was exchanged over the Internet between providers, insurance companies, and patients. And it could be sold for nefarious purposes. That was when Congress came up with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Part of the act allowed people to continue their health insurance when they left a job, but the more encompassing part concerned protecting patients’ privacy.
Just as now, members of Congress did not want to put their names on anything, so the rules for the legislation was left to Health and Human Services.
You know how you spent hours untangling the Christmas lights? Well, that’s HIPAA. The rules are so extensive and so tangled and change so often that it would be impossible for anyone but the most genius of policy wonks to fully understand them. Furthermore, the fines are staggering, and for those who reveal private medical information for financial gain, it can mean jail.
No one can argue that patients and families are entitled to privacy. If I overdose on chocolate, do I want everyone down at the bar cackling about it? But striking the right balance between privacy and public interest is tricky.
So I found it surprising that when one of our area residents died from West Nile Virus, the public was not alerted. I wondered why this was not front-page news. True, deaths from West Nile are rare, but its victims tend to be elderly and immune-compromised. We live in a county of elderly, a county where you can be certain many of all ages are undergoing chemotherapy or radiation or have other diseases that weaken their immune systems.
Once alerted, the public can choose to take extra precautions to avoid mosquito bites. But they can’t do it if they don’t know the disease is active in the area.
My inquiries with the state and county health departments were less than satisfactory. There does not appear to be any hard and fast rules about how and when the public in informed about West Nile virus activity. It takes way too long (up to eight weeks) before the state has all of the information it needs to make its call on the cause of death, and there is no follow-up between the CDC, the state and local health departments.
“It’s collaborative,” I was told.
It seems credible that as the climate changes, Wisconsin will find a growing problem with West Nile virus. More frightening yet, 90 percent of epidemiologists predict a major pandemic within the next 50 years that will kill millions.
Despite all of the modern medical advances of the 20th century, what worried Glenn Hesselgrave during the 1919 flu epidemic concerns us yet.