Eggs US – Price – Chart

Why does this mostly affect the US? I've been abroad most of the year and eggs don't seem overly expensive.

The below links are not all inclusive, but each touch on your inquiry in various capacities (as the problem is complex and multifaceted). Georgia halted all poultry sales due to infection detections, for example.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-more-than-you-wan...

https://agr.georgia.gov/pr/highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza...

https://www.wusf.org/health-news-florida/2025-02-02/deadly-h...

https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/01/21/134m-poultry-and-c...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13447-z

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0609227103

It's spreading abroad, but the US seems to be ground zero. The US's agricultural methods also make it extremely vulnerable to infectious disease (if one breaks through the continuous deluge of antibiotics we pump into our animals).

My guess is how lax the US is with factory farm animal welfare. When an epidemic breaks out, it hits these factory farms much harder and the USDA (government food agency) cracks down and indirectly drives up prices.

The bird flu is mostly contained to North America. Birds fly north/south, not east/west, so so far there has been no reports of it moving across either ocean. This is why Europeans and Asians are terrified of bird flu transmitting between humans, because then an infected human could get on a plane and spread it there. So far, however, that threat remains unrealised.

Didn't the UK just cull millions of birds for H5N1?

To cite a close-to-home example, chicken farms in Canada typically have about 25,000 chickens, whereas ones in the U.S. often have millions. So an infection that requires the entire flock to be slaughtered has a much bigger effect on the supply of eggs south of the border.

Eggs are usually produced and sold regionally. The current bird flu epidemic impacting US chicken farms will be less impactful elsewhere. I believe there were reported cases of bird flu in Europe at the end of last year, but I don't think they spread to the widespread devastation we're seeing in the US.

Albatross and other birds disagree. And don't forget the birds using ships to migrate.

Yes, it's been a big issue here.

I've not been actively tracking the price of eggs, but I know it's causing a lot of problems for egg producers.

That makes a lot of sense, because I lookup up how we handle it in Denmark and it's the same, destroy the entire flock if a farm is infected. It's just it's not millions, it's 6000, 40.000, 20.000 chickens per farm, not a million.

Weird that the size of the farms aren't being regulated if you know from other countries that it makes containment easier.

It’s not, bird flu has also been detected 1-2 days ago in Portugal near where I live.

Is this a serious comment? Bird flu is happening right now in EU.

Even if it’s not lax. It will spread. There is economy of scale benefits by having larger farms.

But the population is about 57x smaller. So 17.5k chickens would be equivalent in terms of impact.

Are eggs regularly transported long distances in the USA? I don't think I've seen eggs from outside Denmark for sale in Denmark, though many other things (cheese, meat) are.

If people in Minnesota (same population) aren't regularly buying eggs from out of state, then the comparison with Denmark holds.

> I don't think I've seen eggs from outside Denmark for sale in Denmark,

That is because of the strict rules regarding salmonella. Danish chicken farmers will test for salmonella and kill any population of chicken found to have salmonella, leaving our eggs "guaranteed" free of salmonella. Any other country that wish to sell eggs in Denmark will need to be able to make the same guarantee. This is one of the few exceptions for the free movements of goods within the EU.

Unless you segment up your chickens and spread them out, so one farmer may have a million chickens, but spread out on 40 locations. The problem is that you need to kill ALL of your chickens in just a few is sick and having a million chickens in a single location will pretty ensure that you have to constantly kill of all your chickens and replace them.

But there's probably more going on that just sick chickens being killed of.

Sweden, Finland and Norway seem to have the same checks as Denmark [1] but we don't see their eggs for sale here either.

But from a quick search, it looks like I've happened only to live in egg-exporting countries within the EU, which explains why I've never seen it. Even so, whole eggs don't seem to be transported great distances — most imports and exports are liquid or dried egg.

[1] https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/biological-safety/food...

nonsense comment. this bird flu is global and has been decimating a ton of wild animals, not just birds. It's been going on for well over a year.