The continued outbreak of bird flu has resulted in the culling of more than 30 million poultry birds across nine states this year. That’s about 10 million more than the last quarter of 2024.
The loss of egg-laying hens resulted in a national egg shortage, with prices sky high over the first months of the Trump administration. Since then, the cost of a carton of eggs has fallen thanks to decreased demand and falling infections. Last week, the average wholesale price of eggs was $3.13, which is down about $5 from earlier this year.
“You can have all the eggs. You watch, we have too many eggs. In fact, if anything, the prices are getting too low,” President Donald Trump said last week.
But, while the Department of Agriculture, which has led the effort to bring down prices, said in its latest Egg Markets Overview that price levels to the consumer have “eased considerably,” levels “remain at levels not yet conducive to more than normal purchases needs.”
However, bird flu isn’t retreating. Ohio just reported its first outbreak since early March.
This year, the Department of Agriculture has confirmed 41 outbreaks in egg-laying flocks across Arizona, California, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington.
Of the 30.6 million birds affected since January, 19.6 million were in caged systems and 11 million were cage free.
Since January 2022, 168,621,877 poultry birds have been affected.
The majority of the outbreaks this year have been in Ohio, which reported its first human case of bird flu in February and the first known illness involving the D1.3 strain. There have been 13.5 million birds lost in Ohio flocks.
Rapid viral spread there has forced Republican Governor Mike DeWine to tell the Trump administration to hasten its bird-flu response.
“One of the things that is clear is that the federal government is really going to have to accelerate the research that is being done in regard to bird flu,” he said last month.
Last month, the Department of Agriculture announced a plan costing $1 billion to address bird flu, including $400 million to help speed the process for farmers to clean and repopulate their farms, which usually takes about six months. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that relief would happen by the summer.
That was before news that people assigned to respond to bird flu had been cut in recent Department of Health and Human Services layoffs, and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced a strategy to let the virus run wild. Experts said that could only lead to it mutating and put farm workers at greater risk.
For now, health authorities assert Americans should not worry. For one thing, there has still been no evidence of human-to-human transmission of bird flu.
“The current risk of bird flu for the general public is low. However, people with close and prolonged, unprotected contact with infected birds and other animals are at greater risk of infection,” the Ohio Department of Health said.
