Farmers in Georgia’s northeastern corner woke up on Jan. 15 to discover that birds in their flock of 45,000 chickens were ill and dying. Within 24 hours, the state’s veterinary laboratory confirmed the problem was bird flu.
Within two days, the Georgia Department of Agriculture sent an emergency team to kill all infected and exposed birds, disinfect the barns, set up a 10-kilometer quarantine zone around the farm and impose mandatory testing on every poultry operation inside it. The agency also told other chicken producers to confine all their birds indoors, and ordered an immediate stop to bringing birds out in public: no exhibitions, no flea market sales.
Georgia didn’t invent this fast response. There was a checklist to follow: the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 224-page Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Response Plan, known as the Red Book. For 15 years, the Red Book has laid out how to detect bird flu, cull affected birds and prevent further spread. Crucially, the Red Book mandates that poultry farmers get compensation for birds that are killed by the authorities, but not for ones that have died, which encourages farmers to report outbreaks as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, bird flu is no longer confined to birds. For several years, the virus has been jumping from wild birds into wild mammals, and last March it was identified in cows for the first time. Scientists are sounding the alarm: Bird flu’s jump into an animal with which humans have such close contact is a serious warning sign. If this outbreak isn’t controlled, the virus could mutate and plunge humans into a new public health emergency.
And by all accounts, not enough is being done to control the outbreak. Unlike their peers in the poultry business, dairy farmers have no Red Book for dealing with bird flu. They have been pressured to take instruction from public health authorities, but without the support they need to make those steps bearable for their livelihood. As a result, these farmers have been hesitant to act, despite being maligned for moving too slowly. Unless something changes, the specter of bird flu’s devastation will hang over the United States indefinitely — as will the threat of other emerging diseases.
Scientists have long considered bird flu, or H5N1, a leading candidate for causing a human pandemic. Since 2003 the virus has infected at least 954 people around the world and killed at least 464 — an almost 50 percent mortality rate — mostly in people in proximity to infected birds. These have been largely one-off infections, including the first U.S. death from bird flu in January (a person over 65 with underlying health conditions). But scientists fear that bird flu could adapt to pass from one person to another, resulting in a fast-moving lethal epidemic that would resemble the world-spanning 1918 flu.
That’s to say nothing of the devastation to animals. In the wild world, avian flu has infected and killed members of at least 48 mammal species including sea lions and foxes, and has devastated wild bird populations. The current outbreak in poultry, which began in the United States in 2022, has affected more than 162 million commercial, backyard and wild birds — including roughly 10 percent of all laying chickens in the last three months. This has sent egg prices soaring. (Just ask Waffle House customers.)
Bird flu is far less dangerous to cattle, which may explain the initial muted response. According to Jamie Jonker, the chief scientific officer of the National Milk Producers Federation, bird flu infections seem to sicken 10 percent to 15 percent of cows on a farm, but kill only about 1 percent to 2 percent. Symptoms mostly resemble bad colds, though sick cows may stop producing milk. Most cows recover in four to six weeks after the infection is cleared, though some never return to productivity.
But while bird flu may be relatively mild in cows, it poses a potentially greater risk to humans. That’s because unlike birds, mammals like cows have respiratory systems more similar to humans, which could encourage mutations that make spread easier.
That makes the arrival of bird flu on a dairy farm a slow-motion disaster. The incentives for farmers to cooperate remain dismal. Research by experts at Cornell University suggests bird flu can cost farmers up to $1,000 per cow; according to the American Association of Bovine Practitioners, this could cost a farmer operating a 5,000-cow dairy farm as much as $1 million over just a few weeks. The U.S.D.A. created a program last year to compensate farmers for losses from diminished milk production caused by bird flu. But unlike for poultry, the program doesn’t pay for dead or unproductive cattle.
“It’s a huge economic impact,” said Fred Gingrich, the association’s executive director. “The funding that’s available for this disease outbreak to dairy farmers probably covers anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of their actual losses.”
There’s a sense among dairy farmers that the country’s bird flu plans were built on poultry industry structures that don’t bear much resemblance to their own operations. Broiler chickens are deposited in a barn in the first days after they hatch, and stay in that building until they are collected for slaughter, as a batch, six to seven weeks later. Poultry losses from bird flu are covered either by the U.S.D.A. indemnity or by the corporations that supply birds to farmers to grow them under contract.
Dairy cattle, by contrast, don’t arrive and leave in herd-sized batches; they move on and off farms as calves that need raising, newly pregnant heifers or cows nearing the end of their fertility. The annual turnover rate in a single herd may be 30 percent at most.
The dairy industry also includes more than 24,000 sole proprietors. For the vast majority, there are no overarching companies to cushion individual farms’ losses. The costs are being largely borne by the actual farmer, said Keith Poulsen, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine. He added that farmers fear finding the virus in their herds will make them unable to market their milk. (Experts caution they haven’t seen this bear out. It’s confirmed pasteurization kills any flu virus in milk.)
Fear that their herds would face the same 100 percent cull as infected poultry flocks — but without equivalent compensation — may have slowed cooperation with public health plans. Restrictions on interstate cattle movement were rolled out in April 2024, and testing of milk supplies began in December. But not all states have yet joined the U.S.D.A. testing plan.
Pressure to pick up the pace is growing. Cases are spilling over into humans: 41 of the 69 bird flu cases tallied in the country so far were linked to dairy farms. But there’s also a fear that the simmering cattle outbreak could set off a more catastrophic poultry epidemic. Michelle Kromm, a veterinary consultant who is a chair of the American Association of Avian Pathologists’ H5 influenza task force, said the poultry industry has learned how to guard against wild bird incursions. But cattle outbreaks pose new risks to nearby poultry operations: Perhaps the virus spreads through routes such as shared farm workers or equipment, or on the wind. Thus it is possible that, if not controlled, such transfers could cripple egg and chicken supplies, hurt milk production and drive dangerous mutations.
What’s becoming increasingly clear is that human health and animal health need a reconciliation. Public health responders need to adopt a more granular understanding of the vulnerabilities of all types of farmers. Agriculture needs to recognize that its cherished flocks and herds can serve as the source of devastating diseases.
The goal should be to develop response plans that can be modified for a range of pathogens, rather than responding to one disease in one species at a time. This means building better surveillance programs for emerging diseases, making big investments in rapid diagnostics and funding the research that could forecast where disease threats might surface next.
Unfortunately, such policies seem unlikely, given that the Trump administration has signaled its intent to soften its focus on infectious disease. The recent announcement by the U.S.D.A. that a second form of bird flu has surfaced in cattle underscores how diseases are already behaving in ways we can scarcely anticipate — and why repairing the relationship between public health and agriculture is so critical.
The lack of proactive measures and research thus far has left farmers in a terribly vulnerable state, Dr. Poulsen said. To effectively combat bird flu, he said, “they have to be made comfortable to raise their hands and be part of the solution.”
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