Data Reporter
Irena Hwang is a data reporter at ProPublica. She previously worked at NPR, The Associated Press and The Dallas Morning News. She has a master’s degree in journalism and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ProPublica borrowed machine learning methods from academic research to better understand links between forest loss and spillover risk. The results were surprising, but led us to a story we wouldn’t have found otherwise.
ProPublica spent months teaching a computer to analyze past Ebola outbreaks linked to deforestation. What we found reveals a weakness in the way that governments and public health experts are preparing for future pandemics.
In the wake of recent deaths from bacteria-tainted eyedrops, a ProPublica analysis of FDA data reveals that the agency only inspected 6% of the overseas plants where drugs and their ingredients are produced in 2022.
Une simple clairière de forêt nous sépare de la prochaine pandémie mortelle. Mais nous n’essayons même pas de la prévenir.
The forests around the epicenter of the world’s worst Ebola outbreak are getting patchier. The next pandemic could emerge from the edges around these patches, where wildlife and humans mix.
Research links deforestation to outbreaks. Combining two peer-reviewed models and the latest satellite images of tree loss, we discovered that the sites of five previous outbreaks have a greater chance of facing Ebola again.
The next deadly pandemic is just a forest clearing away. But we’re not even trying to prevent it.
Data reporter Irena Hwang thought counting fish to evaluate the hatchery system in the Pacific Northwest sounded like a fun project. That was before she started asking biologists about what the publicly available data could really tell us.
The U.S. government promised Native tribes in the Pacific Northwest that they could keep fishing as they’d always done. But instead of preserving wild salmon, it propped up a failing system of hatcheries. Now, that system is falling apart.
For a ProPublica reporter who did Ph.D. work in bioinformatics, data on bacterial DNA helped reveal how a once-rare salmonella strain spread through the chicken industry. Salmonella infantis is multidrug-resistant and is still making people sick.
For years, a dangerous salmonella strain has sickened thousands and continues to spread through the chicken industry. The USDA knows about it. So do the companies. And yet, contaminated meat continues to be sold to consumers.
Deputies in California’s Antelope Valley are disproportionately citing Black teens, often for minor infractions, like getting in fights or smoking. “They’re turning the principal’s office into the police station,” said one lawyer.
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