What to know as bird flu hits California poultry farm, 133 dairies

Oct 24, 2024

VISALIA —Bird flu has spread to a poultry farm in Tulare County and continues to hit more San Joaquin Valley dairies and dairy workers.

The poultry farm has a flock of 786,600 birds, according to the USDA Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Poultry farms in Washington and Utah, with about a combined 2.5 million birds, have also seen bird flu outbreaks.

To provide context on the overall size of the U.S. poultry flock, there are more than 378.5 million egg-laying chickens in the United States. In 2023, more than 9.4 billion broiler chickens and 218 million turkeys were processed in the United States, according to the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Despite its name, avian influenza can affect animals beyond birds, including humans and cattle. The virus can also spread via contaminated surfaces or materials, such as manure, egg flats, crates, other farming materials and equipment, and people's clothing, shoes, or hands.

In January, a Sonoma County poultry farm avian flu outbreak that led to the slaughter of 550,000 birds led to a brief spike in egg prices in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 2023, the bird flu led to record egg prices and widespread shortages across the United States. The price of a dozen eggs more than doubled to $4.82 at its peak in January 2023.

H5N1 avian influenza, the formal name for bird flu, has been confirmed in 133 dairies in California, as reported by the California Department of Food and Agriculture on Oct. 22.

Outbreak spreads:US to double emergency bird flu vaccines as more people, herds become infected

Tulare County dairies, the largest dairy-producing county in California and the United States, are impacted in several ways by bird flu, said Tricia Stever Blattler, Tulare County Farm Bureau executive director and corporate secretary.

“It can really pull a lot of human workforce power away from their other duties in trying to care for sick animals,” Stever Blattler said.

Will bird flu be the next pandemic?Vaccines are prepped, just in case.

“There have been some pretty large dairies that have hundreds of animals that are infected with the actual virus. They are trying to do things just like any of us would do if we were home with a flu. They're trying to get those animals to take on extra fluids and give them supportive medication to make them more comfortable."

Dairy owners are also faced with a reduction of milk volume.

“I know a couple of the creameries are reporting that their volume of milk is down because some of these dairies are seeing a big drop in the production of milk,” Stever Blattler said.

The weather has added to the impact of bird flu on local dairies.

“The really hot weather that we had just up until the last couple weeks created another big factor that caused some of our dairies to have some higher mortality losses that were because of sick animals having to also survive in really, really high heat during this illness," Stever Blattler said.

Healthcare for dairy workers with bird flu is also becoming more of a challenge.

Is your cat at risk?Domestic cats in Colorado are dying of bird flu

“The county's health department is trying to make sure that those workers seek care through one specific medical provider to try to ensure continuity of care,” Stever Blattler said. “While that's probably appropriate from a human health doctor point of view, it's a little bit difficult because it means the dairy employer has to make sure that the employee goes to a certain location, even if that dairy employer has a different medical facility for their workers’ comp care.

“The dairy community is being responsive to trying to protect animal health and human health of their workers, to the best of their abilities,” said Blattler, but she noted that a lot of dairy producers “have voiced the frustration that trying to get enough equipment, and veterinarian support for their livestock has been difficult.”

So far, the outbreaks has had little impact on overall milk production and milk prices in California, according to the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security at UC Davis.

“So far, there has been little industrywide impact of the disease on share of cattle affected in California, so little impact on marketable dairy production,” said Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis told the Los Angeles Times. “There is almost no bird flu on dairies outside California, and that means farm milk prices have not risen measurably.”

Unless many more herds are infected in California or elsewhere, “farm milk prices and consumer milk prices are unlikely to rise measurably," Sumner told the Times.

Human cases of bird flu have increased to 15 in California, with nine cases in Tulare County, according to the Tulare County Health & Human Services Agency’s Oct. 22 update. Infections have also been reported in Kings and Kern counties in the San Joaquin Valley.

California officials said the risk to the general public remains low but warned that those who "interact with infected animals are at higher risk of getting bird flu."

There are no known links between the six confirmed cases, which suggests there is widespread transmission among dairy herds and that the infected cattle pose risks to people working near them.

One of the newly identified people who tested positive worked on the same farm as a previously infected person, but they worked in different areas of the facility and were not in close contact, the CDC said.