Media Monitor: The new age Typhoid Mary who wasn’t

[COMMENTARY] A Grand Rapids area dermatologist, it was revealed late last year, may have exposed as many as 13,000 people to HIV and Hepatitis B and C because of his alleged failure to properly sterilize medical equipment. The Kent County Health Department sent out 13,000 letters to patients of Dr. Robert Stokes. The letters encouraged those patients to get tested for the three viruses and offered free screenings.

The Stokes case came to light after federal officials charged Stokes with insurance fraud. He was sentenced to 10 and half years in prison in December. There were separate allegations he had unsanitary practices, which the state investigated. That’s why the letters were sent out.

A whopping 776 people out of that 13,000 took the state up on the offer. Of those, none tested positive for Hepatitis B or HIV, and only six tested positive for Hepatitis C. In case you were figuring, that means that 6 percent of those at risk were actually screened for the three deadly viruses, and of those, about 0.77 percent tested positive for the Hepatitis C virus. About 1.6 percent of the general population would be expected to test positive for the Hep. C virus. So evidently there was less infection in Stokes’ patients than in the general population.

Continued -Bonus points here, too — the Michigan Department of Community Health could not connect any of the viruses with each other or to Stokes’ office.

That’s all pretty good news, but that is not how the Michigan Department of Community Health and west Michigan media outlets handled it.

In a late Friday afternoon press release, MDCH spokesman James McCurtis wrote of the non-connectedness of the viruses and the inability to connect any of the infections to the dermatologist in this way: “Investigators are unable to determine when these individuals became infected with hepatitis C, only that they are currently infected.”

There was nothing in the press release to match McCurtis’ statements in an interview.

“There are no findings that can implicate or say his practices transferred Hepatitis C to any of the patients,” McCurtis said by phone just before 5 p.m. on Friday. “The six of them could have gotten it beforehand. There are people walking right now who don’t even know they have Hep. C. There is no way of knowing if they contracted Hep. C from his practices.”

McCurtis continued, “There is no evidence that shows that these viruses are related.”

Is it really that difficult to put that in a press release sent out as an official statement of a government body? Particularly when that release was sent to the media at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday? We call that “dumping” in the industry. You put out news you don’t want covered on Friday afternoons because no one is paying attention, and in this case, because the MDCH spokesperson is only available Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., who would cover it?

Well, without access to the spokesperson, media outlets were left to muddle through on their own. And muddle they did.

In the Grand Rapids Press, the unidentified author did not even bother to mention that the identified infections were unrelated to each other.

NBC affiliate WOOD TV 8 at least mentioned “Investigators are unable to determine when these people became infected.” But they too fail to mention the viruses were unrelated. And they waited until the fifth paragraph of a seven-paragraph story to even bother to make this mention.

Now, to be fair, Stokes is no angel. But a Typhoid Mary he isn’t, and painting him as such with slipshod press releases and lazy reporters failing to make one phone call to ask questions and probe the press release does nothing for anyone in Kent County.