The rapid spread of the bird flu outbreak in the United States is pushing the price of eggs to new highs despite the overall cooling of food cost inflation since its peak in 2022, right in time for the holiday baking season.
The average cost of a dozen Grade A large eggs increased by 8.5% in two months according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from $3.37 in October to $3.65 in November.
That’s in part because the egg-laying hen flock decreased by 3% since last year, down to 315 million birds, and egg production is down by 4% according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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While food prices overall increased by about 2.4% since last year, according to the consumer price index, the price of eggs alone has increased by 37.5%
Bird flu, or H5N1, has been a growing problem among wild migratory birds in the US since 2021, making industrialized poultry flocks vulnerable to the disease as well.
Widespread outbreaks of the virus is in part what triggered a massive spike in egg and poultry prices in 2022, in addition to the pandemic-era inflation.
The poultry industry has a strict protocol in place to eliminate infected birds from the flock, called culling.
A hands-on process for poultry workers, the protocol involves individually picking up infected birds and placing them in a cart equipped to euthanize the birds as humanely as possible with carbon dioxide gas.
The H5N1 bird flu circulating among poultry flocks has also been circulating in dairy cattle since early April, an inter-species jump that has public health experts concerned about the possibility of the virus mutating to potentially infect humans.
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Although the risk of bird flu becoming a human-to-human transmissible disease is relatively low, President-elect Donald Trump will have to balance public health concerns about mitigating that risk with the economic fallout of higher grocery prices.
Trump made lowering grocery prices a key part of his presidential campaign but has subsequently conceded that bringing costs down would be “very hard.”