Largest producer of fresh eggs in the U.S. temporarily halts production after finding bird flu

Published: Apr 02, 2024 Duration: 00:03:51 Category: News & Politics

Tags : Texas news Michigan p_cmsid=2494279 abc abcnl Virus bird production FLU halted chickens foods cal-maine facilities p_vid=news-108812937 poultry

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so the largest producer of fresh eggs in the US calain Foods is temporarily halting production at a Texas plant after bird flu was found in its chickens company says that there is no no known bird flu risk associated with eggs currently in stores and none have seen any kind of recalls but people are understandably very concerned especially after the virus was detected at a poultry facility in Michigan let's bring in our medical contributor Dr Darian Sutton along with business reporter Alexis Copus so all right doc um what do we need to know right now well what we need to know most is that this is a relatively low risk to the general population but what is this Aven influenza otherwise known as H5 in1 it belongs to the influenza family and it's incredibly contagious between animals and now that we have this human case here in the United States senses and and precautions have been heighten but thankfully there is no sign of human-to-human transmission which is what we're eily looking for to make sure that we're not seeing that at all but thankfully there's no sign of that all right good so Alexis you know calain Foods is the largest producer of fresh eggs in the US so let's talk about the impact that this uh is going to have on prices if not already right so I think the best thing we can do is look to the most recent incident of Aven bird flu which wasn't that long ago a little over a year ago and when that happened we saw uh the price for a dozen eggs hit nearly $5 that was a record high we've come down a bit since then we're at $3 for a dozen that's still an awful lot more than we were paying about 3 years ago when a dozen eggs was about $160 and it's uh for a number of reasons inflation one of them chicken feed prices are higher for Farmers but in terms of caline they're now trying to look for production at other facilities to uh sort of meet demand and if going forward Farmers have to call more chickens and cannot keep up with demand you're going to see prices move higher overall the good news is the agriculture Department actually expects egg prices to come down this Year by the end of the year about 3% um but in the interim even if the Aven flu were to dissipate right now there's a little bit of a lag three to six months for Farmers to bring new chickens on a new flock on so we could see elevated prices for for a bit all right so um Daran bird flu already being detected in two facilities that we've reported uh now are you worried that it could continue to spread or do you think they can pretty much lock this down well I mean given how pathogenic or how infectious this is among animals I'm expecting that we might likely see more signs of animal to animal transmission but again thankfully we haven't seen any sign of humano human Transmission in the case that was identified the symptoms seemed relatively mild the patient reported something called conjunctivitis which often includes redness or itchiness of the eyes and the symptoms of this influenza can be very similar to the typical influenza that we see influenza A and B for example uh fever headach uh body aches um uh weakness and it can progress to severe symptoms including pneumonia but the reasons why I feel more reassured is number one there's testing available and so there are precautions in place to make sure that we identify new cases also the process of pasteurization helps to eliminate the virus if there's any possibility of contaminating milk and then also there are tlu stockpiles that have been placed uh for specifically this reason uh because this has been tracked for quite some time and been discussed for quite some time among scientific groups okay well follow the story of course Dr Sutton Alexis thank you so much hi everyone George Stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel if you'd like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our Channel and don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts thanks for watching

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