Hot topic: Pandemics and the price of eggs

Here in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, we are used to the price of eggs having risen since the Covid pandemic. It’s okay though, prices have stabilised and have even come down slightly. 

But in the US the high price of eggs – taken as emblematic of the country’s dissatisfaction with the Biden administration as it fought in vain to battle inflation – hasn’t subsided. Indeed, if anything, prices have continued to rise. 

This hasn’t anything to do with poultry feed prices, or supply chain problems, or wider politics or economics. 

It’s because US farmers have had to cull tens of millions of heads of poultry over the last year, due to the H5N1 bird flu virus really taking hold there. The virus is now present in poultry in all 50 US states and experts are seriously worried. 

Earlier this week, the Global Virus Network, a group of virologists and public health experts from more than 40 countries, issued a stark warning that the US needed to bolster its existing efforts to monitor and control the outbreak. 

The GVN is not overly-concerned with the price of eggs. It is more worried about viral spillover of H5N1 from one species to another, potentially triggering another global pandemic. 

Some might be tempted to see this as scaremongering: with the trauma of Covid-19 still fresh, people are perhaps likely to see potential pandemics at every turn, like ghosts in the shadows.  

There might be some truth in that. But just because the world has suffered a major pandemic recently, doesn’t mean another will not happen until a decent period of time has elapsed. Pandemics aren’t polite, they are chaotic. 

So far at least 70 people in the US have been infected with H5N1 from birds, according to the US’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and one person in the US state of Louisiana has died. 

At the moment the viral strains that have infected humans “are not able to transmit between people” said Professor Marion Koopmans, of the GVN, who is head of viroscience at Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands. But if relevant mutations occur “that can change abruptly”, she said. 

She added on X / Twitter: “We cannot predict if a next pandemic will evolve out of this situation. But it does tick many boxes, telling us to be on the alert.” 

Writing in the journal The Lancet Regional Health – Americas, the experts, who included Prof Koopmans, warned: “While the current North American outbreak is largely mild, historic mortality rates of 50% from H5N1 in humans suggest the terrible consequences of underreacting to current threats. More should be done to mitigate spread of “bird flu” to humans.” 

Most of the time, while such viruses do occasionally infect humans from the host species (in this case, birds), they do not make the leap to being able to jump from human to human. And even when they do, as was the case with swine flu in 2009, mortality rates can end up proving a lot lower than initially feared, due to many early mild or moderate cases going unreported. 

Even so, this is clearly something to watch. And not just because of the price of eggs.