On her first day on the job last week, new US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins held a meeting to review the agency’s options for controlling the bird flu outbreak and possibly help lower the price of eggs.
In another meeting last week, Rollins met with two dozen farmers to hear their ideas about how to fight bird flu. She promised them relief.
“This problem wasn’t created overnight, and it will take us a little time to tackle this issue, but we will take aggressive action to help our poultry farmers combat avian flu and to make eggs affordable again,” she said.
On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump promised to bring all grocery prices down on “day one.” But from December to January, grocery prices had the sharpest increase on a monthly basis in more than two years.
Economists blame eggs. The price of eggs rose in that period at the fastest rate in nearly a decade, according to the latest Consumer Price Index. Unless something changes, Rollins’ department predicts, egg prices will continue to rise more than 20% this year.
One reason eggs are pricey and sometimes hard to find is an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called bird flu.
It’s become a “major” threat to commercial and backyard flocks in the United States, hitting egg-laying hens the hardest, according to the National Chicken Council. These hens account for more than 77% of the more than 162 million poultry affected by the virus since the outbreak began.
The US has successfully dealt with sporadic outbreaks before, said Dr. Matt Koci, a professor in the Prestage Department of Poultry Science at North Carolina State University who specializes in immunology. Although poultry vaccines were studied, biosecurity measures and culling flocks with sick birds have been the strategy to take on the virus.
Cases among chickens typically flared up only when wild birds, who can be carriers of the disease, would migrate through the US, Koci said. After they had flown on, case counts would fall to nothing.
Now, though, there is so much virus in circulation that it’s been turning up in resident birds and spilled over into other animals like cows, cats and even dolphins.
Many scientists believe it is unlikely that the virus will ever disappear completely from the US again.
“Now that it’s always here, kind of kicking around in the environment, we are seeing these little brush fires of cases popping up all the time,” Koci said. “We were hoping it was a fluke, but this definitely seems like the new normal.”
‘It’s a horrible way to die’
When a domestic chicken, turkey or duck gets sick, it’s devastating for the flock. Wild birds can live with the virus, but commercial flocks often cannot.
“It depends on the strain, but within 48 hours, a farmer may go from seeing a few dead birds to half his flock, and certainly, within three to five days, they’re all dead,” Koci said. Healthy members of the flock are often culled to help stop the spread. “That’s the reason we stamp it out. We’re trying to kill them before the virus does, because it’s a horrible way to die, and that helps us contain it.”
In the past 30 days alone, bird flu has been confirmed in 134 commercial and backyard flocks in the US as of Monday, affecting 18.91 million birds, according to the USDA.
The agency requires farmers to report any cases and then start mass cullings to limit the spread. It’s an approach the Trump administration blames for high egg prices.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he was working with the USDA secretary to find options to fight bird flu beyond culling chickens. He blamed the empty egg shelves at his grocery store on President Joe Biden’s approach to the outbreak.
“That happened because they killed all the chickens, and so what we need to do is have better ways with biosecurity and medication and so on,” Hassett said.
When the outbreak started in 2022, many commercial farms stepped up biosecurity measures like isolating chickens from wild birds, keeping workers’ clothes and boots clean, and spraying disinfectants.
“You could always do more, sure,” Koci said.
Some medications are in development, but nothing can cure chickens with bird flu. Culling is one of the most effective approaches, Koci said.
“As ugly as it is, just like with the wildfires in California, sometimes you have to cut all the trees down and dig a fire line to keep the fire from spreading from one neighborhood to another,” he said. “We can’t do anything to save that poultry house, but maybe we can dig enough of a line around it to save neighboring farms.”
The problem with vaccination
Some politicians have suggested vaccinating chickens. There are a few options available, and the Trump administration has given the conditional green light to one made by Zoetis.
Zoetis initially got a contract to create a bird flu vaccine for chickens from the USDA’s National Veterinary Stockpile in 2016. As with a human flu vaccine, the company has had to keep updating it to make sure it matches the virus strain in circulation. It appears to be effective; the US Fish & Wildlife Service used it in 2023 to protect endangered California condors. But the commercial chicken industry isn’t so interested.
For one thing, the US is the second biggest exporter of poultry products in the world, but overseas trading partners won’t buy chickens vaccinated for bird flu
The World Trade Organization doesn’t forbid the sale of vaccinated birds outright, but other countries won’t buy them. The seller has to demonstrate that the birds are completely free of bird flu, and vaccines can mask the presence of the virus. Studies show that vaccines can keep a chicken from developing severe disease, but they don’t totally prevent infections.
The National Chicken Council, the US industry’s trade association, wrote to the Congressional Chicken Caucus last week to remind lawmakers that “vaccinating any poultry sector – egg layers, turkeys, broilers, or ducks – will jeopardize the entire export market for all US poultry products.”
The council said that if farmers can’t trade overseas, the US would face a potential $10 billion-plus annual economic loss, as well as significant harm to its poultry business.
“We currently support USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) ‘stamping out’ policy to eradicate the virus,” it said.
Vaccination would also add expense. There is no aerosolized or waterborne vaccine, so workers would have to pick up each one of millions of chickens and vaccinate them individually.
Other countries have gone the vaccination route, and it seems to have helped. France started vaccinating millions of farmed ducks in 2023, along with biosecurity measures and enhanced surveillance. The number of outbreaks fell to 10 during the first six months of the campaign, compared with 315 over the same time period before vaccination began, according to the French Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty.
Other animals need attention, too
In Western states, veterinarians would have to vaccinate additional animals beyond birds, said Rodrigo Gallardo, a professor in poultry medicine at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
Bird flu has moved into large numbers of dairy cows, with 973 dairy herds affected as of February 21, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That is just disseminating the virus all over the place,” Gallardo said.
Several vaccines for bird flu are being tested in cows, but as with birds, “vaccination is like the last resort for the US,” he said.
Gallardo agrees that more needs to be done to manage bird flu outbreaks in the US, particularly as more humans get sick.
The virus is still considered a low threat to humans, but as of Monday, 70 people in the US had been infected. Farm workers and people who have backyard flocks are at higher risk of infection, but scientists are concerned that the virus will spread further – and possibly adapt to spread between people.
“Right now, with all this virus floating around and all the birds and all the mammals and all the dairy cows getting infected, it is super difficult to control,” Gallardo said.