Scientists are still trying to understand exactly how a virulent bird flu is spreading through farms in the United States, but one pattern is clear: poultry and cows risk exposure to sick wild birds migrating across the Americas.
My role
I read that the WHO was concerned bird migration could spread avian flu but I hadn’t read a full story that explainee how. I found bird migration data and chicken farm data, so all that was left was to prove there was a connection between the two. Now, there are papers that explicitly say bird flu spreads to chickens through waterfowl migration. But at the time, it was still being researched, so scientists were wary to definitively draw the connection. No one source could tell me the whole story. So, I pieced together segmented information from each source, eventually determining that birds carrying avian flu posed risk to livestock that they’d pass over during their annual migration.
Pitch
Reporting and writing
Illustrations
Graphics and maps I researched and produced the farm scene showing how birds can spread avian flu on a farm, bar chart of top infected birds, maps showing geographic range of top infected birds. My colleague Travis made the opening map of the U.S. and Canada that shows mallard ducks passing over chicken farms.
Page design I based the colors for the page and graphics off of the opening map. Once I saw the visual effect of the dotted mallard data animating over the red-filled chicken farms, I decided to carry the visual throughout the page.
