I think quoting is fine, but it's surprising coming from a senior adviser at a U.S. Government department.

> “What we have right now is this ginormous ongoing outbreak of Sporothrix brasiliensis in Brazil,” Lockhart, a senior adviser at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The article doesn’t. It quotes a CDC advisor who does.

I agree even though I use ginormous in normal conversation. In the right context it is fine, I just don't think this is the right context.

I also find it hard to take an article seriously when its volume comparison employs "Olympic-sized swimming pools". I think the fraction of people who have a clear enough mental idea of the dimensions or volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is pretty small relative to the articles readership, which I hope they measure realistically under the assumption that the number of readers will always be close to half the number of eyeballs on the page. Otherwise they would be inflating readership and that would be misleading.

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

It probably does a better job of getting the point across to a general readership than if they'd used overly technical domain-specific jargon about quantity of cases and speed of its spread.

Here in Scotland, 'ginormous' is normal, possibly more regularly used than 'enormous' or 'giant'.