Shiffer: Secrecy won't help to stem Minnesota's bird flu crisis

The avian flu epidemic sweeping through poultry farms has triggered a state of emergency in Minnesota. It's not serious enough, though, to sacrifice a little privacy.

More than 2.5 million affected birds have been killed, and every day brings news of three or four more farms infected. Public health workers are urging poultry workers to take anti-flu medications, and monitoring them for any sign that virus has jumped to humans. Gov. Mark Dayton has authorized an emergency multiagency response and communicated with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack about the crisis in Minnesota.

Yet the state refuses to make public the names and addresses of the affected farms. A state law prohibits the Minnesota Board of Animal Health from releasing "animal premises" data.

That's right. The privacy of turkey and chicken farmers outweighs the public's right to know the exact locations of a frightening outbreak that's disrupting the state's economy and putting health workers on alert.

At a news conference Thursday, the governor and members of his cabinet sought simultaneously to sound an alarm and calm fears about the outbreak. Minnesota farm country is swarming with workers from federal and state agencies assisting with the grim task of depopulating the affected farms. They have notified property owners within a 10-kilometer radius of the affected farms.

When I asked about where those farms were, Dr. Bill Hartmann, executive director of the Minnesota Board of Animal Health, noted that the state has "given general information about [the outbreak's] location by county. But I'm prohibited by law from disclosing exact locations."

That law dates to 2005, after the spread of mad cow disease prompted the government to order better tracking of the nation's livestock. Farmers demanded confidentiality, out of fears that giving the public access to the names of farm owners, their addresses and the size of their herds or flocks invited visits from "agro-terrorists," among other concerns. Environmental advocates say farm secrecy is a way for agribusiness to prevent needed scrutiny of its operations.

After the news conference was over, Hartmann told me his agency is also sharing the farm locations with University of Minnesota researchers studying the outbreak.

Minnesota is not alone in keeping a lid on the whereabouts of affected farms. State agricultural officials in two other hard-hit states, Wisconsin and Iowa, said they are withholding that information for another reason: To keep curiosity-seekers away.

"We don't want anybody going into the quarantine area, with the risk of maybe picking up something on their clothes, camera equipment, whatever," said Jim Dick, spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

The feds won't say where the farms are either. They cite a federal privacy law that prohibits giving out information on individuals, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agricultural's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

The owners of some farms, including the J&A Farms egg operation near Detroit Lakes and Sunrise Farms in Osceola County, Iowa, have confirmed publicly that they have been struck by avian flu. The names of others will likely emerge, and I doubt that will result in a stampede of germ-spreading gawkers.