Some of Avis Favaro’s best stories have started with a stranger calling her on the phone. One of them, she says, was “an odd phone call” that led her to the discovery of a Manitoba doctor in the 1940s who claimed to cure cancer with chicken egg embryo extracts. That phone call also led to an investigative feature story that won a Gemini award, one of many accolades Favaro has received in over two decades working the health and medical beat.
But Favaro says the best recognition of her work isn’t the awards. It’s getting stopped by a viewer in the street, or receiving an email and hearing that her reports have had a positive impact on someone’s life.
“For me, health reporting and health journalism is the one truly useful piece of journalism out there,” she says. “You touch people more directly than if you’re doing a crime story or a business story.”
Favaro has been CTV’s health and medical correspondent since 1992. She files stories ranging from 90-second reports to lengthy, news magazine features, such as the story of Dr. Paolo Zamboni, an Italian physician whose research on multiple sclerosis ignited debate and controversy in the medical community. Favaro calls that feature the “most significant story” of her career.
Before starting at CTV, Favaro worked at Global for a decade. She did an internship with the network as a graduate student of journalism at Western. After graduating in 1982, Global hired her as a news writer and she eventually became a general assignment reporter.
Favaro says that few journalists were covering the health and medical beat at the time. “I started to tell my assignment desk, ‘Hey, if you let me just do health stories, I can work in advance and you don’t have to worry about me and I’ll have stories for you that will be in the paper the next day,’” she says. Her editors agreed and Favaro had her own beat by 1988.
More than two decades after getting into health reporting, Favaro says the number of medical journalists is still slim. “Most of us have hung around for a considerable amount of time because we just like it,” she says. “What propels me now are stories that help people and make a difference.”
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