Via Ärzte Zeitung: EHEC and the Robert Koch Institute - Authority under fire. This is a fairly long article, too long to edit from a computer translation, so I'll try a short summary. If you're a German speaker and you find I've distorted the meaning in the original story, please let me know.
The Robert Koch Institute, Germany's major health agency, is being criticized for reacting too slowly to EHEC, and for choosing the wrong strategy in blaming vegetables as the path of infection.
The RKI, however, on Friday released data from a survey it conducted of EHEC and HUS patients as compared to a control group of 2,100 healthy people, with identical gender balance, age, and region of residence. The results indicated the patients had consumed significantly more vegetables than the control group.
Critics attacked RKI's speed and methodology, saying the patients should have been interviewed instead of simply being given questionnaires. RKI said they had indeed acted quickly. In fact, RKI had begun investigating Hamburg cases before Hamburg's own health authorities did.
The story also mentions a new rumour: that the outbreak is a terrorist attack.
My own criticism of RKI, from this distant vantage point, is that its updates are too brief and too few.
This is basic crisis communications: Get out in front of the story, give people as much information as you have, and give them more information as it becomes available. Acknowledge the criticism, change your position when the criticism is deserved, and defend your position when you think the critics are wrong.
This is one of those proverbial "teachable moments" when an agency or government can educate the public about what it's facing and win support simply by treating the public as intelligent adults. Withhold information, or spin the story, and what the public learns in that teachable moment is that it can't trust you.
