After a bird flu outbreak killed 20 million hens and spiked egg prices, farmers suspected the virus was moving on the wind—a theory the federal government failed to investigate. But ProPublica did, employing cutting-edge techniques to analyze genomic data and weather patterns to show airborne transmission was plausible, revealing how the government had left farmers ill-equipped to protect their flocks and leaving the nation vulnerable to a pandemic.
We were able to pinpoint the exact farms where outbreaks had occurred, something the federal government does not publish, allowing us to map and trace the spread of the disease.
The key finding—that farms downwind from an infected egg farm were much more likely to contract bird flu soon after—drew on months of work to get beyond the canned responses to the question of “Why are egg prices so high?”
