First it was only decimating poultry flocks. Then it spread to dairy cattle. Then one human caught it from cows. Now it’s in 20% of our pasteurized milk supply.
“It” is bird flu, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). And while all indications – so far – are that the milk supply is safe to consume and the one human and the dairy cows are getting over it quickly and easily, this sounds so much like a certain event that happened at the start of 2020.
Keep that painful, three-year lesson in mind. HPAI's impact on food prices and poultry availability is obvious (remember $5-a-dozen eggs?), but there's potentially a whole lot more at stake, now that it's appeared in other species and in humans and has (so far benignly) infected our milk supply.
In early February of 2020, I was at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York annual meeting in Florida, where the CEOs of the top consumer goods companies pitch their companies to the analysts. Executives from General Mills, Mondelez, McCormick and Unilever all mentioned an unusually strong strain of flu that had forced the temporary closings of their plants in China, especially Wuhan. While all admitted the shutdowns would have some effect on financial results, they seemed to think it would blow over relatively quickly.
A week or two later, we all learned the terms “coronavirus” and Covid-19, and the world changed.
That one was a classic "zoonotic" disease – spreading from animals to humans. With the infection of that farm worker in Texas, bird flu, too, has become zoonotic and not just relegated to one species of animal.
We’ve been reporting outbreaks of avian influenza for about 10 years, although it’s been around much longer – a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention web story says the first recorded case occurred in 1878 in northern Italy. But it didn’t seem to make headlines till 2015. The impacts of those outbreaks have been all over the map.
The one in 2022-2023 was one of the most damaging in the U.S., with more than 58 million birds in 47 states either killed by the virus or culled as a precaution. That outbreak is estimated to have cost the government roughly $661 million and farmers a billion dollars or more. And that doesn’t factor in the cost to consumers, who were paying $5 or more for a dozen eggs.
This is not solely an American or North American problem. Past outbreaks have been all over the world; the 2020 one spread to Europe, affecting flocks in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. I saw 2023 news items for outbreaks in Hungary and Africa.
So it's a global problem. And there should be a global response to it.
As HPAI apparently originates with wild birds, it’s going to be impossible to cure it at the source. USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service have been testing avian influenza vaccinations for more than a year now. And there are plenty of rules in place once an infection occurs in your flock.
I’m sure there are other mitigation strategies. I just hope the USDA people are getting the support, financial and otherwise, they need. I hope FDA and CDC are involved as well. And it wouldn’t hurt to get food and animal safety agencies from across the globe on the same page about this.
Am I overreacting? I don't believe anyone thought a bat in a wet market in Wuhan could bring the world to its knees and kill 7 million people. Let's nip HPAI in the bud before it kills more chickens, spreads to more species of livestock and infects more humans. Then mutates, as viruses are wont to do, into something truly dangerous.