Patient Consent for Publication

To the Editor. —We are authors of the manuscript submitted to JAMA that reported an outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis referred to by Dr Snider in his article.¹ The case reports in our manuscript contain no identifying information; even age and sex are omitted because of their limited relevance to that report. Rejected by JAMA, the same manuscript was subsequently accepted for publication (with case reports) in another peer-reviewed journal²; this journal did not require patient consent. We have recently published other case reports that have contained sensitive information without requests from the editors for patient consent.^3-5 Of note, one of these journals is represented in the ICMJE. In one of the manuscripts accepted for publication, the picture and name of a patient described in a case report had appeared in a major newspaper prior to publication of the manuscript.⁴ With regard to the outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis,² because