medical privacy goes to the zoo

Visitors to animal exhibits, such as the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., hardly think about the animals' privacy as they watch them eat and sleep and roam about their pens. After all, it's a zoo, designed to allow visitors to gaze upon the animals in all of their glory.

So it must have struck Washington Post reporter D'Vera Cohn quite odd that she got a negative reply last May to her Freedom of Information request for the medical records of Ryma, a popular giraffe who died at the zoo earlier this year.

Zoo director Lucy Spelman, in an e-mail response to Cohn's request, refused to grant The Post access to medical records, necropsy and pathology reports.

"One reason is privacy," Spelman wrote. "Certainly the privacy rules that apply to human medical records, and the physician-patient relationship, do not apply precisely the same way to animal medicine at a public institution like the National Zoo. But we believe they do in principle."

Spelman further explained that the core of veterinary medicine is the physician-patient relationship. The medical record, described by Spelman as the written history of this relationship, "is not written in a style or format geared toward the public."

The Post reported that Spelman, a noted scholar in veterinary medicine, also said the release of the information would not be beneficial to a general public that could not understand its intricate details and that it would disrupt scientific research.

In referring to federal medical privacy rules, Spelman may have given journalists another cause of worry about the effects such rules might have on medical coverage.