The Philadelphia Inquirer continues its efforts to improve restaurant inspection disclosure in the City of Brotherly Love.

The Philadelphia Department of Public Health keeps its restaurant inspection reports secret for 30 days, unnecessarily risking the health of unsuspecting diners at restaurants with serious hygiene problems.

Philadelphia’s is the only health department in the nation’s 10 largest cities that has such an asinine policy, as Philly.com reported last week. Phoenix takes 72 hours to process its reports and make them public, while the rest – including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles – publish them immediately.

Within Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh also posts inspection reports immediately. So do Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester Counties. Across the Delaware, Camden and Burlington Counties post the information online within five days. A metropolis like Philadelphia should be able to keep up.

A health department spokesman told Philly.com that sanitation reports are kept confidential for a month to give establishments time to challenge them. It’s fine to allow restaurants to appeal inspectors’ findings, but not at the expense of diners who deserve to know if a restaurant’s cleanliness has been questioned. Besides, there have been only four such appeals since 2009.

The 30-day grace period is too long. It suggests that the health department lacks confidence in its inspectors’ ability to evaluate sanitary conditions. If that is the case, then rather than err on the side of a restaurant that may have a rat or roach problem, the department should improve its inspectors’ skills and reduce the possibility of inaccurate assessments.

The department’s website (www.phila.gov/health/foodprotection/FoodSafetyReports.html) notes that every inspection report is a “snapshot” that “may not be representative of the overall, long-term sanitation and safety status of an establishment.” That’s an important caveat. But it doesn’t mean that having carefully cultivated a reputation for fine dining, Philadelphia should risk it by being too slow to point out which of its restaurants should be avoided.