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Arizona Egg Farmer Wants to Vaccinate Chickens From Bird Flu, but Government Won’t Allow It
A prominent Arizona egg farmer says vaccinating chickens from the bird flu would lower prices, but the federal government won’t allow it.
“What’s frustrating is, we know that that’s the answer,” Glenn Hickman, president and CEO of Buckeye-based Hickman’s Family Farms, told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Outspoken with Bruce and Gaydos on Tuesday. “And yet, we can’t get our federal government to release the vaccine so that we can vaccinate our birds.”
Hickman said some European countries are using vaccines produced in the U.S. on chickens, ducks and turkeys to gain control of the avian flu outbreak in their flocks.
“We have the ability to do it,” he said. “We vaccinate for other poultry diseases. It wouldn’t be a big deal. We could start that as soon as we get the green light from the government.”
Delayed CDC Report Shows Increased Evidence of Bird Flu Spread to People
A scientific report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published Thursday shows some veterinarians who provide care for cattle were unknowingly infected with the H5N1 avian influenza virus last year.
The report is the latest evidence that the outbreak in dairy herds is spreading undetected in cows, and the spillover into people at highest risk of exposure is going unnoticed. Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University who studies transmission of influenza virus, said it is clear from the report and earlier research that “there are H5N1 cases we are missing.”
The report is one of three about bird flu that were scheduled to be published three weeks ago in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. But the scientific publication was abruptly suspended when the Trump administration instructed federal health agencies to pause all external communications on Jan. 21.
Bird Flu Is Spreading in Cattle, but Some States Still Aren’t Part of U.S. Milk Testing
Three of America’s top milk-producing states aren’t a part of federal surveillance testing for bird flu even as a new variant is turning up in dairy cattle, in what some public health experts say is a troubling gap in the national effort to identify and detect the spread of the virus.
The U.S. Agriculture Department started a voluntary milk-testing program in December after the virus was found to have jumped to cattle in March. The recent outbreak of avian influenza in the U.S. was first detected in 2022, but has picked up steam over the last year, decimating poultry farms nationwide, killing tens of millions of birds and driving up the price of eggs.
While the risk to humans remains low, many public and animal health experts argue that broad, nationwide testing of milk is critical to containing virus cases that might otherwise go undetected, giving the variants more opportunities to spread to animals — and to humans.
WHO Has Only ‘Limited Information’ on Bird Flu Spread in US
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday warned that it has only “limited information” about the spread of bird flu in the U.S., which has all but cut communications with the global health body.
Shortly after his inauguration last month, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the United States to withdraw from the WHO, an organization he has repeatedly criticized over its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has repeatedly said the United Nations health agency regrets the U.S. decision, and hopes it will reconsider. On Wednesday, he warned that there were actions the U.S. government was taking “that are unrelated to its intended withdrawal from WHO but which we are concerned are having a serious impact on global health.”
