Farms across California have had to euthanize several million chickens and ducks in recent weeks, as a wave of avian influenza threatens to upend national poultry and egg supplies.
While cases of the disease have been cropping up throughout the U.S., agricultural hubs in Northern California have endured the greatest losses over the past month.
“There’s economy of scale in commercial agriculture, including poultry,” Maurice Pitesky, an avian disease specialist at the University of California Davis (UC Davis) School of Veterinary Medicine, told The Hill.
“No pun intended — if you put your eggs all in one basket, the virus gets into a facility and then all the birds have to be euthanized, unfortunately,” Pitesky said.
As of midday Friday, about 10.62 million birds in 63 flocks nationwide had been affected by highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreaks over the past 30 days, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).
Of these flocks, 37 were commercial and 26 were backyard, and a total of 3.8 million birds were concentrated in California.
The current spike in HPAI — on the rise since mid-fall — is the latest escalation in a nationwide outbreak that has ebbed and flowed since 2022.
A previous surge in the disease rattled the nation’s poultry industry last year, leading to national egg shortages and record-high price tags. The country could be headed in that direction again: While egg prices are still half of what they were about a year ago, they have risen 12 percent over last month, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Cal-Maine Foods, the country’s biggest egg producer, cited a 91 percent loss in profits in its fiscal 2024 second quarter earnings — generating $17 million in quarterly net income, as opposed to $198.6 million during the same period last year.
Max Bowman, Cal-Maine’s vice president and chief financial officer, acknowledged the need to improve “biosecurity measures to mitigate the risk of highly pathogenic avian influenza” in a statement accompanying the report.
HPAI is typically introduced into the U.S. from wild birds that migrate along the East Asian Flyway and cross paths with birds traveling along the North American routes, according to UC Davis’s Western Institute for Food Safety and Security.
Pitesky described migratory birds as “the primary reservoir” for HPAI, noting that ducks and geese often travel thousands of miles — meeting during fall in the Arctic, before heading south.
“When all those different flyways interface with each other, that’s where you get all these exchange[s] of viruses,” he said.
While wild waterfowl often carry the virus without developing symptoms, spreading to domestic poultry can result in what institute researcher Michael Payne described in a statement as “catastrophic mortality.”
“It doesn’t take much,” Payne warned. “A drop of manure from an infected bird weighing only a gram, about the same as a dime, contains enough virus to infect one million birds.”
Two strains of HPAI, which attack multiple organs in chickens, come with up to 90-100 percent mortality rates and can cause death within 48 hours, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Although sporadic human infections have occurred with various bird flu viruses, they have typically happened only after prolonged, unprotected contact with sick birds, per the CDC.
California’s Central Valley hosts about 500 to 600 commercial poultry farms, as well as robust habitats for both nonmigratory and migratory waterfowl, according to Pitesky. This domestic-wild combination, he explained, has created a “spatial interface” for disease transmission.
Exacerbating that clash, Pitesky said, are the dual threats of human development and climate change — which have collectively caused shifts in the proximity of waterfowl to these farms.
The five California counties that currently have active infections of HPAI include Sonoma, Marin, Merced, Fresno and San Joaquin, the California Department of Food and Agriculture determined in a recent investigation.
“To protect other flocks in California, the locations of the detected infected flocks are currently under quarantine, and the birds are euthanized to prevent further disease spread,” the department said.
Sonoma County last month declared a state of emergency following the detection of HPAI at two commercial poultry farms in the southern portion of the county. To protect other flocks in the region, those locations were put under quarantine and about 250,000 birds were euthanized.
Such action served to prevent further disease spread, but also came at the expense of the local agricultural economy, Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt said in a statement at the time.
Southern Sonoma County poultry farms supply “hundreds of thousands of eggs each and every day,” which in turn bolsters the “food chain for the entire West Coast if not beyond,” he added.
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