Factory farming's impact on the bird flu

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Hello,

The H5N1 virus, better known as bird flu, is spreading across the country, causing a large ripple effect that has us questioning its impact on animal welfare, our own health, and our grocery bills.

Today, we're giving you a one-time look inside our member-exclusive Slack Chat between editorial director Bryan Walsh and senior reporter Kenny Torrella — both of whom have extensive experience covering bird flu — where they discuss the current state of the virus, its origins, and what it'll take to stop the spread.

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SLACK CHAT

A look into the Vox newsroom's DMs

A conversation between editor Bryan Walsh and senior reporter Kenny Torrella about the current state of the bird flu and what it'll take to stop the spread.

Bryan Walsh
So let's discuss bird flu. You've been writing about it for some time, focusing on how it has been spreading among domestic poultry (and increasingly other animals). And now it appears to be a threat to humans as well. What kind of connection have you seen between our factory farming system and the spread of bird flu?

Kenny Torrella
The vast majority of egg-laying hens in the US are on factory farms, where the genetically similar birds are tightly packed together and live in their own waste — conditions that weaken their immune systems and make them more susceptible to disease. To be sure, a lot of backyard flocks and hens at smaller operations are falling ill to avian influenza, too. But because factory farms hold so many hens — hundreds of thousands to millions — the detection of the virus at just a handful of farms in a given month can send a shock to the supply chain, which is what we've seen and has led to egg shortages and price spikes.

Bryan Walsh
That's so interesting. I've been covering bird flu off and on for more than 20 years, since some of the first big outbreaks in Southeast Asia. In Hong Kong, where I was based at the time, the city once made the unprecedented decision to cull ALL of its poultry in an effort to slow the spread of the virus after it had infected and killed several people. Is that what's happening with US poultry farms as the virus spreads?

Kenny Torrella
Well, fortunately for consumers, the US isn't culling all of its hens. But US Department of Agriculture policy requires that if the virus is detected on a poultry farm — whether it's raising egg-laying hens, turkeys, or chickens for meat — the producer must cull the entire flock in order to slow the spread. If left untreated, it could further spread to wild birds, and a recent preprint paper (so, not peer-reviewed) found that the virus could spread in the wind. This is an important point to look further into because intensive poultry farming tends to be geographically concentrated, so one big farm with an H5N1 detection could have another large farm within a few miles.

Bryan Walsh
And this virus spreads incredibly fast among birds, with great lethality. One area you've written about often here, which I think goes undercovered in the media, is just how brutal the culling methods are. You're talking about, what, thousands, hundreds of thousands, of birds on a farm that must be quickly killed to halt the spread of the virus. What does that actually translate to on the ground?

Kenny Torrella
Well, fortunately for consumers, the US isn't culling all of its One of the most common methods is called "ventilation shutdown," in which the factory farm's vents are sealed and the birds slowly die of heatstroke over many hours. The industry has been increasingly using "ventilation shutdown plus," which entails pumping in heat to speed up the process. This method of mass culling isn't confined to this bird flu outbreak. In 2020, slaughterhouse capacity slowed down because so many workers had contracted Covid-19, and a quarter of a million pigs — with no slaughterhouse able to process them — were killed on the farm via ventilation shutdown.

Bryan Walsh
That is brutal. And we're also seeing this virus spread to other animals, right? Like cows? That's particularly worrying to me — while the bird flu virus has infected the occasional person, the big fear is that it will genetically mutate in a way that allows it to more easily spread from person to person, leading to a flu pandemic. Potentially a devastating one, given how lethal bird flu has been to humans when it does infect them. (Back in my foreign correspondent days, I talked to survivors of bird flu who were left with lifelong disabilities.) And of course, the more animals it can infect, the greater the chance it can hit the right genetic combo to start a pandemic.

So it's in everyone's interest to stop bird flu in birds. There is a vaccine for poultry against bird flu, right? Is it being used?

Kenny Torrella
That's right, H5N1 has been detected in nearly 1,000 US dairy cattle herds over the last year. The virus' spread to mammals, especially those that humans interact with like dairy cows, has been of particular concern to virologists and epidemiologists tracking the virus for the reasons you mentioned — it gives more and more opportunities for it to mutate and potentially gain the ability to become more severe in humans and/or spread from person to person.

The US Department of Agriculture recently granted conditional approval to a vaccine by animal pharmaceutical company Zoetis. A conditional approval means the USDA says it's safe and effective, but it doesn't give egg producers permission to start vaccinating poultry birds.

For a while, the US poultry industry was united in its opposition to vaccinating birds, simply because it can disrupt trade. When a bird is vaccinated, it can be hard to tell if they were actually sick from the virus or just have antibodies from the vaccine. But that united front in the poultry industry is starting to crack. Recently, egg, turkey, and dairy trade groups wrote to USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins asking her to speed up the agency's vaccine development, while the chicken industry opposes vaccination (their industry has been hit much less hard than the others).

Trump's USDA has had a topsy-turvy response to the outbreak, and in keeping with that theme, just this week Rollins reversed her pro-vaccine position after talking with the poultry industry.

But even if the USDA grants egg producers permission to start vaccinating their flocks, it'll be a huge logistical challenge to vaccinate tens of millions or hundreds of millions of birds, and it'll be awhile until those efforts result in larger egg supplies and lower prices.

Bryan Walsh
So beyond the ever-present threat of a new pandemic, I should point out that the bird flu virus has been infecting people for almost 25 years without starting one, though that could change any day), how is this affecting normal life for everyone? We've seen huge shortages and increases in price for eggs — is that part of bird flu? And should we be worried about the risk from what we're eating?

Kenny Torrella
The surge in the price of eggs can almost entirely be chalked up to bird flu, but there's also general food inflation. (Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats suspect some egg companies and grocers may be using the bird flu outbreak "as an opportunity to further constrain supply or hike up egg prices to increase profits.")

At this point, eggs remain safe to eat. Bird flu has been detected in the milk supply, though the US Food and Drug Administration has said it's safe so long as it's pasteurized (so, don't drink raw milk).

Nearly all of the US cases of bird flu were in people who worked directly with infected poultry or dairy cattle, so for now, farmworkers — whose jobs were already dangerous and precarious — are most vulnerable to the disease. But there have been a few cases that have stood out and suggest it may pose a threat to the larger population. For example, a Canadian teenage girl was hospitalized and severely ill after contracting the virus and no one knows how she got it. Someone in Missouri also became infected with H5N1 after no known contact with infected animals. A woman in Louisiana died after exposure to backyard chickens and wild birds.

Bryan Walsh
So, just to bring it back full circle before we go — Kenny, you normally cover factory farming for Vox's Future Perfect. To bottom line it: Do you think the bird flu situation is in some ways at least, a consequence of the way we raise animals for food? And unless that system changes, is it possible that we will continue to suffer these kinds of outbreaks — and maybe something much worse?

Kenny Torrella
I think so. Farmers have been battling disease outbreaks since the dawn of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, so well before the rise of factory farming. And you could argue that birds raised outdoors are at high risk of contracting H5N1 because they're more likely to come into contact with wild birds who are shedding the virus.

But as I mentioned earlier, factory farms — with their genetically similar animals overcrowded and living in stressful conditions — are the perfect place for a disease to quickly spread and genetically mutate. Some experts believe the rise of American-style factory farming in China in the late 20th century played a pivotal role in the virus' evolution and spread.

I'd hope that outbreaks like this one — and the bird flu outbreak in 2015, and the swine flu outbreak in 2009 — might give policymakers and the industry some pause to question how we raise farmed animals. But all signs point to a maintenance of the status quo — implementing policies and practices to better manage disease outbreaks rather than change our food system to say, one that is more plant-based, to minimize the risk of these disruptive events.

Bryan Walsh
Yeah, I'd love to think we've learned our lessons, but pretty much everything since Covid belies that. Oh well. Thanks, Kenny!

Kenny Torrella
Thanks, Bryan!