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With Thanksgiving Around the Corner, Bird Flu Cases Are on the Rise Again

Oct 28, 2025 11:21:00 -0400 by Josh Nathan-Kazis | #Agricultural Commodities

Farmers have had to destroy 7.4 million chickens and turkeys since the start of September. (Jeff Dean / AFP / Getty Images)

Key Points

Bird flu outbreaks are climbing again on U.S. chicken and turkey farms, ending a respite from the virus that sent egg prices soaring last year and raised fears of a new human pandemic.

Since the start of September, avian flu outbreaks in nearly 90 chicken and turkey flocks across the U.S. have led farmers to destroy 7.4 million birds, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data analyzed by Barron’s.

The numbers are rising again amid the fall migration, when billions of wild birds fly south across North America. Waterbirds such as geese and ducks carry avian flu viruses, and can infect commercial poultry as they migrate past their farms.

This fall’s numbers thus far are small relative to last winter, when poultry farmers were forced to destroy 23.2 million birds in January 2025 alone. The rise, however, echoes a pattern from last year, when a slow increase in poultry farm outbreaks in October and November led to an explosion of cases in the winter.

In the early months of 2025, the virus decimated the U.S. flock of egg-laying hens early this year. By March, the average price of eggs in U.S. cities was $6.23 per dozen, a record high and up 85% in just five months.

As of September, the price of a dozen eggs had dropped back down to $3.49 per dozen, according to the most recent data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The worry now is that a new spike in bird flu infections could push those prices up again.

Turkey prices are also a concern, as demand spikes ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. In a publication last month, the USDA’s Economic Research Service slightly raised its forecast for the average price of a frozen turkey this year.

The avian influenza virus known as H5N1 has threatened U.S. poultry farms since 2022, after migratory waterfowl carried a new strain of the virus into North and South America. Birds carry a long list of different influenza viruses, but scientists have been particularly worried about H5N1 since it was first identified in the early 2000s, because fatality rates among the relatively few humans infected with the virus have been high.

Around half of the nearly 1,000 people known to have been infected with H5N1 over the past two decades have died, though recent cases have generally been milder. Of the 73 confirmed human cases in North and South America since 2024, only two have been fatal.

So far, H5N1 cannot transmit easily between humans. The concern for public health experts has been that, as the virus passes between animals, it could mutate in a way that would allow it to move easily from human to human. That sort of mutation would quickly set off an influenza pandemic.

Public attention to the H5N1 outbreak grew in early 2024, when veterinarians discovered H5N1 spreading through dairy herds in Texas and New Mexico, the first confirmed avian flu cases in cattle anywhere in the world. The USDA has since confirmed cases on more than a thousand dairy farms, nearly 800 of which were in California.

The pace of new H5N1 cases on dairy farms peaked in the fall of 2024, and has since slowed to a near stop. The USDA has confirmed infections in no more than three new herds per month since June of this year, with the latest reported new infection on a dairy farm in Idaho on Oct. 10.

New human cases, too, appear to have slowed. Of the 73 confirmed human cases of H5N1 in North and South America since January 2024, 70 were in the U.S. Most of those cases were identified last fall. There have been no new human cases of H5N1 in the U.S. since January, though there was one in Mexico in April and another there in September, according to the Pan American Health Organization, a United Nations-affiliated public health agency.

On poultry farms, meanwhile, cases are ticking up again. H5N1 is virtually always fatal among poultry and spreads quickly, so farmers must destroy entire flocks after a single confirmed case. Since February 2022, U.S. farmers have killed more than 182 million captive birds as a result of H5N1 infections. In 2025 alone, 13.5% of all caged, egg-laying, commercial birds in the U.S. have been killed, as have 16.6% of non-organic, cage-free birds, according to the USDA.

After poultry farm outbreaks peaked in January and February 2025, the number of birds destroyed per month due to H5N1 infections fell quickly to 2 million in March and 1 million in April, before falling below 30,000 in July.

Now, however, the numbers are rising again. In September, 3.9 million birds were killed, and 3.5 million birds have been killed so far this month as of data available on October 27.

Those numbers are roughly similar to the numbers reported in fall 2024: There were few impacted farms in Sept. 2024, but 4.4 million birds were destroyed in October last year. The numbers climbed quickly from there, to 6.9 million last November and to 18.2 million last December.

For turkeys at the market, the USDA said in September that the average price for a wholesale frozen bird this year is projected to be $1.32 per pound, significantly up from last year’s wholesale price of $0.94 per pound. The price increase reflects higher costs that have persisted across the year and are unrelated to the recent increase in bird flu outbreaks. The agency did not update its estimate in October because of the ongoing government shutdown.

More granular changes in U.S. turkey prices are hard to see thus far. According to an October 24 USDA report, the price of a whole, unfrozen, Grade A turkey hen was $1.75 per pound on average, flat from the prior week.

The question now is whether new biosecurity measures meant to protect commercial flocks have made enough of an impact to prevent another spike like last year’s. In February, the USDA announced a $1 billion investment to fight H5N1, which focused heavily on biosecurity measures meant to keep the commercial poultry safe from being infected by wild birds.

Some avenues meant to prepare for a potential H5N1 human pandemic, meanwhile, have been shut down by the Trump administration. In May, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services pulled nearly $600 million in funding that the Biden administration had awarded to Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine.

Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com