The USDA’s effort to stamp out the virus has led to the loss of at least 166 million birds since the latest outbreak began in February 2022.
The United States is entering its fourth year of a near-continuous outbreak of the highly pathogenic avian influenza.
Despite leadership changes at the country’s top agricultural and public health authorities, the government is continuing the strategy of culling millions of birds to limit the spread of the disease.
A senior official who spoke with The Epoch Times said the culling is continuing because there is no better option available.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) refers to the strategy as “stamping out.”
Avian influenza, or bird flu, was first identified in China in the 1990s and has since spread worldwide through migratory wild birds.
The disease first hit the United States at the end of 2014. At the time, America successfully deployed the stamping out strategy to stop the bird flu outbreak in less than a year.
The experience led to a formal bird flu response plan being rolled out in 2017. That plan, which is still followed, is “the preferred and primary strategy” for the United States to deal with bird flu outbreaks.
During the 2014 outbreak, 70 percent of bird flu cases were spread from farm to farm, according to the USDA.
A farm-to-farm transmission occurs when a worker or a piece of equipment moving from one farm to another carries the disease and it spreads to the other birds.
Carol Cardona, one of the nation’s foremost experts on avian influenza, said the U.S. egg industry learned from its experience and significantly improved its biosecurity practices to reduce farm-to-farm transmission.
Farm-to-farm transmission was down to 15 percent as of early 2023, according to USDA data.
Cardona, a professor in the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Minnesota, said the disease has mutated since 2015 and is being spread to farms either by wild birds or potentially by domestic and wild mammals that carry the disease into poultry houses.
She said the disease is on its way to becoming endemic, or regularly recurring, among wild birds.
The USDA’s effort to stamp out the virus has led to the loss—through culling and disease—of at least 166 million birds since the latest outbreak began in February 2022, according to figures from the USDA released on March 5.
The disease has led to a crisis in the U.S. egg industry.
The declining supply of eggs, due to the loss of so many viable egg-laying hens and hens that had not yet reached maturity, has caused the price of eggs to rise to the highest level on record.
