Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro convened farmers, academic leaders, biosecurity experts and lawmakers on Tuesday to address the state’s latest avian influenza outbreak — one that accounts for more than half of the country’s total cases.
Officials said more than 7.6 million birds in Pennsylvania have contracted the virus, putting at risk the state’s multi-billion-dollar poultry industry.
“We’re obviously in crisis mode when it comes to [highly pathogenic] avian influenza,” Shapiro said in Lancaster County, where most of the 26 impacted flocks are located. Over the last three weeks, he added, “Pennsylvania is really sadly at the epicenter of this.”
Experts on the roundtable said migrating water birds commonly pass the disease on to commercial or residential poultry flocks, such as chickens and turkeys. Without a cure for the virus, farmers must cull their flocks — sometimes by the hundreds of thousands — to stop the spread of the disease.
As a result of the outbreak, Shapiro said he asked U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins for two dozen bird flu specialists, who are now working on the ground in Pennsylvania. The state has also asked the feds for “regulatory relief,” Shapiro said, a request which allows more veterinarians to work alongside state veterinarian Alex Hamberg to diagnose local flocks. And lastly, Shapiro says the Trump administration could expedite the development of an avian flu vaccine.
“ We also understand that a vaccine could be complementary to other efforts, but Secretary Rollins was also very direct with us that this is not a tomorrow thing — that this would take months and months and months to deploy, if at all, and it would likely be in the form of a pilot.” Shapiro said during the roundtable. Shapiro said he spoke with Rollins at a White House event on Friday.
Although bird flu has been detected in Allegheny County in the past, there were no current cases as of Tuesday, according to a spokesperson for the county Health Department. Still, it’s important for even backyard chicken coop owners to register with the state so they can be aware of nearby infections, said Pittsburgh-area state Rep. Emily Kinkead.
“They’ll get a flock number… [which] allows the Department of Agriculture to alert them if there are cases around them, if they’re in a quarantine area,” said Kinkead, the Democratic vice chair of the House Agriculture and Rural Affairs committee. “[The state] can’t help people, they can’t address issues if they don’t actually know that your flock exists.”
The 2024-25 state budget also set aside $6 million to establish a western Pennsylvania veterinary blood testing lab at the Penn State Beaver campus in Monaca. The governor’s office says it’s the fourth such diagnostics lab in the state, and that it will “improve statewide surveillance, particularly for producers in western Pennsylvania.”
Leaders from Penn State Extension and the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary program also participated in the roundtable, and said their institutions are also lending pathologists and virologists to tackle the outbreak.
Penn veterinary medicine dean Andrew Hoffman said he’s “ a very strong advocate [for] building out a vaccine for the commercial poultry.”
“The world has come to the point where we see the risks not only for birds, but also for potential spread to humans, and that is not something that we want to see layer on top of this,” Hoffman added.
To help recoup losses for farmers that have been forced to “depopulate” about 14 million birds in Pennsylvania since 2022, the state set up a recovery fund. It currently has $60 million in reserves, and producers can apply for relief to cover payroll, mortgages and other expenses.
And while Pennsylvania is ground zero for what experts characterized as an early seasonal outbreak of avian flu, the avian flu isn’t expected to cause a spike in egg prices locally — as long as it’s contained to Pennsylvania, said Hamberg, the state veterinarian. .
Lawmakers said that with Easter and Passover — two of the biggest egg-consuming holidays — just around the corner, the country still has ample supplies of eggs to avoid high prices seen last year.