After a lot of talk about data science, dataviz finally returns to the blog!

This graph shows the historical trends of several animal diseases in Spain since 2001. The data comes from the Red de Alerta Sanitaria Española (RASVE), which acts as a central hub for coordinating animal disease surveillance, control measures and information dissemination in Spain. The graph shows which animal diseases have reported more outbreaks over the years:

• 2005-2010: Outbreaks reporting begings with BSE, bluetongue and scrapie. Major bluetongue outbreak.
• 2010-2015: Bluetongue cases fluctuated, while West Nile emerged, scrapie remained prevalent, and BSE outbreaks decreased.
• 2015-2020: Scrapie, West Nile, bluetongue, and Aujeszky’s disease stand out.
• 2020-present: New threats notified have included Epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD), Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), Sheep pox and goat pox. Tuberculosis is now a notifiable disease in zones declared free.

Soon I will share with you another post explaining how it was done (or how I failed many times before coming up with something decent). This is my second attempt to come up with a nice way to communicate the reported outbreak data (my very first attempt can be found in this previous post: RASVE Dashboard). This interactive graph was my first experience programming outside of R, and I would like to thank Diana Ow for the Data Visualization Society mentoring sessions that helped me get started!

P.D. If you are interested in my work, you can have a look at my SVEPM poster: “Modular risk analysis to assess complex risk pathways: An application to farm biosecurity“. And you can subscribe to find out when I publish the next post ✨.