Dear members of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors:

Neon Tommy, the online news publication based at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, is engaged in a sober and continuing effort to profile victims of swine flu in L.A. County and to evaluate the performance of our public health officials in meeting the H1N1 threat. We are working to understand who is getting the virus, who is dying from it and what public health officials are doing about it.

We believe that our coverage, which began this month and is focused on analyzing the death certificates of L.A County's first 44 H1N1 victims, provides a valuable service to the public at large and to the victims' families in particular. We believe we are helping to fill a genuine hole in news coverage about swine flu and that our reporting has been sensitive and informative.

In meeting what we at Neon Tommy believe to be our obligation to inform the public about this emerging epidemic, however, we have met substantial resistance from L.A. County Director of Public Health Dr. Jonathan Fielding and from the County Counsel's Office. We've tried numerous times over the last five weeks to arrange an interview with Dr. Fielding, and he has declined every time. The County Counsel's Office, without providing any explanation to us, changed its policy and will no longer provide us with death certificates of every swine flu victim that the county reports to the California Public Health Department.

Therefore, we are asking you to call Dr. Fielding and County Counsel before you to answer simple but important questions about the county's response to the pandemic.

We want to be clear: we are not asking you to do our work for us or to arrange an interview with Dr. Fielding. We are continuing with new efforts to reach out to the director and to engage him in a conversation about this crucial public health matter. That said, we think the questions we have for Dr. Fielding are of vital importance to the people of this county. We would urge members of the Board of Supervisors to put these questions to him at your meeting Tuesday:

• What is the process for conducting post-death tests when H1N1 is considered a probable cause but is not listed as a cause of death on the initial death certificate?
• What is the process for updating death certificates that do not list H1N1 as a primary or underlying cause of death, when testing later determines it to be one?
• Twenty of the 44 death certificates we obtained from the Department of Public Health did not list H1N1 as a cause of death, and some of the victims' families told us they did not know their loved ones had died from swine flu until we told them. What is the process for notifying victims' families when the cause of death is determined to be H1N1 many weeks after the time of death? Are there public health reasons to inform the family and community in a timely way?
• We have been told the Department of Public Health is devoting about half of its 4,000 staff members to swine flu. What exactly are they doing, and where are they deployed?
• What coordinating role does the county health director play to ensure the doctors, hospitals and public health officials meet the challenge of the epidemic? For example, what special protocols are in place to ensure H1N1 is not spread in hospitals?
• Neon Tommy's research of the first 44 death certificates of L.A. County swine flu victims suggest that most were lower- to middle-class residents and that some 80 percent belonged to communities of color. What special steps or programs has the public health director taken to address the epidemic in these target populations?

We also would urge you to ask the County Counsel's Office to return to its original policy, which was in place on Oct. 9 when the health director granted Neon Tommy access to all death certificates of H1N1 victims, including 20 that did not list H1N1 as a cause of death but which were determined by post-death tests and investigations to be swine flu victims.

The new policy, which was set forth in a letter to a Neon Tommy reporter last Friday, will grant us access only to those death certificates that initially list swine flu as a cause of death. Two weeks ago, when we were told of this proposed change, we asked for a formal explanation, as is our right under the Public Records Act when an agency refuses to disclose requested information. We believe County Counsel and Dr. Fielding failed to follow section 6255 of the Act when, in a letter dated Nov. 10, they refused to tell us their reasons.

We believe that the death certificates of all victims of swine flu, even those identified as H1N1 victims by post-death testing, are public information. If you agree, we ask that you direct the County Counsel to tell you, in public session, what their legal basis is for withholding those certificates from us.

We appreciate your time and attention and hope you will recognize the importance of making the County's response to this pandemic as transparent as possible.

Best Regards,
Richie Duchon

Neon Tommy Senior News Editor