We’re accustomed to public agencies and institutions stonewalling us over public records requests. But the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine has taken stonewalling to another level with its refusal to turn over the necropsy (animal autopsy) report for Hank the chimpanzee.
A UT spokeswoman literally declined to release the necropsy report over HIPAA. Apparently, she thought the “P” in Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act stood for Primate.
Congress enacted HIPAA in 1996 to protect the medical records of human patients. And while chimpanzees are the closest human relative — scientists in 2005 sequenced the genome of the chimpanzee and found that humans are 96 percent similar — they are not afforded federally protected privacy.
Hank was the best-known denizen at the Chattanooga Zoo at Warner Park. For nearly all of his 42 years, he spent his days being gawked at by zoo visitors. There was nothing private about Hank’s life.
His death last week was one of seven at the zoo in the past few weeks. It’s important that the public know how Hank and the other animals died. And as reporter Pam Sohn reminded the UT spokeswoman last week, her college and the zoo are publicly funded entities subject to state open records laws.