An 89-year-old is dead from Legionnaires' disease, and health officials say she almost certainly got it from a water dispenser at the Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital. Not a back-alley noodle stall, not a construction site. A hospital. The kind of place you go to get away from bacteria, not meet one in a paper cup by the lift lobby.

Here's the part that should bother you. The same week, RTHK reported the city's first child flu death of the year, no name, no ward, no hospital given. A private hospital can get a bug named, dated and traced to a specific dispenser within days. A dead child gets a headline and nothing else. Two different sicknesses, two very different appetites for telling you the truth, and only one of them involves a hospital's own PR department deciding how much you get to know.