How Bad is Bird Flu in Early 2025?
Bird Flu and egg prices have been contentious topics recently, so it was not exactly a pleasant surprise when Indiana discovered another series of bird flu outbreaks last week. With millions of birds dead or depopulated already this year, it seems Indiana’s bird flu is off to a rapid start for 2025. However, its not just Indiana having a rough start to the year. Several other states have reported similar findings, or far worse, with approximately 35.8 million birds already affected within the first two months of 2025 in the U.S. according to the CDC and USDA.
We decided to take a closer look at the data provided by the CDC and USDA to see just how hard bird flu has been hitting at the beginning of 2025. The data reported in the CDC chart simply states flock sizes, but due to the requirements to cull infected birds and how deadly the disease is to poultry, the indicated flock sizes will likely be very close to the number of dead birds.
So How Bad is the Bird Flu This Year?
2025 has only just hit March as of the writing of this article, so all the data included is up until the end of February. Additionally, the data included by the CDC did not have a few newly discovered additional cases listed on the USDA’s site as of this writing. The last time we checked, there were an additional 5 outbreaks with another 223 birds affected.
To get an idea of how bird flu has been affecting poultry this year, we took the records provided by the CDC and analyzed the total number of outbreaks and affected birds so far. You can see the numbers in the charts below.
January had more outbreaks than February, though February has fewer days to calculate outbreaks in. Even with the extra few days it is likely that February would be a few outbreaks short of January, as Jan. experienced roughly 4.3 outbreaks a day while Feb. had approximately 3.8 outbreaks a day. While the total number of outbreaks may seem low in comparison to how many places raise chickens, it is important to remember that one outbreak in a massive farm can rack up infected birds rapidly. You could have ten outbreaks with nine of them being backyard coops of no more than ten birds, and still hit hundreds of thousands of infected birds with that last commercial operation. In fact, as you will see when we break numbers down by state, North Carolina managed to rack up over three million birds affected with just three outbreaks.
While the total outbreak numbers have a fairly small gap, the affected bird numbers have a much wider difference. This may indicate that more of the outbreaks were on smaller operations or from backyard hobbyists in Feb. However, the numbers are still extremely high. As you will see in the next charts, the month of January alone this year had more birds affected than the entirety of 2023 according to the USDA and CDCs numbers. While low compared to Jan., February still had roughly half the number of affected birds as 2023. A reminder, in most of these cases affected birds are likely to be culled, so unless there were special circumstances most of the numbers here can correlate roughly to bird deaths.
Looking at these charts below we can see that 2022 hit US poultry extremely hard with an incredible 718 outbreaks, and nearly 60 million birds affected. While 2023 seemed to be calm in comparison, 2024 hit a much higher death count than 2023 with less outbreaks. This could indicate that 2024 had more commercial operations hit than in 2023. What is truly interesting though, is that 2025’s affected bird numbers are already more than half the affected birds from 2022 in two months. At approximately 120 outbreaks a month, 2025 is looking to surpass all previous outbreak numbers if cases don’t slow down during the rest of the year.
Breaking it Down by State
As you can see from the above charts, that is a lot of affected birds. Next, we investigated the numbers by state to see which areas seemed to be hit the hardest at the moment. States with any form of red had at least one outbreak, (though mysteriously, Wyoming had one recorded outbreak with no affected birds according to the data we received. Potentially they never got to count the flock?). Additionally, you can hover or tap on any state to see the numbers recorded for it specifically.
Not shown; Puerto Rico had 380 birds affected with 1 outbreak.
From the data we analyzed, Ohio has been hit especially hard so far in 2025 with over 14 million birds affected. While there are a few states with over a million affected birds, none come even close to Ohio’s massive numbers. An interesting case as mentioned earlier was North Carolina with a very large number of affected birds with an extremely small number of outbreaks. This is most likely explained by the affected flocks being large commercial ones as opposed to backyard coops. Additionally, there are not many states left in the contiguous United States that have had zero cases, and with plenty of time left in the year, it is possible bird flu may reach each contiguous state. While the 2025 state map is looking very filled in, You can see all affected counties since 2022 on the CDC’s site tracking all the information. If even one county of a state has an outbreak that would affect our map, as such, a state may have much less spread than indicated by the 2025 map.
Affected Flock Types
So we have seen what states were affected, but what kind of flocks were these? We also split out numbers based on flock designation. the CDC noted a few different commercial designation types which we have combined into a signal category of “commercial operations”. Additionally, WOAH stands for World Organisation for Animal Health. The California Department of Food and Agriculture defined both WOAH poultry and WOAH non-poultry both quite succinctly in their Instagram post;
“WOAH poultry and WOAH non-poultry are terms used to specify classes of birds at risk of entering international and export markets. In short, a WOAH non-poultry bird does not enter the food supply while WOAH poultry do.
For example. You have a backyard flock of 10 chickens. Your family eats the eggs and sometimes share (not sell) eggs with neighbors. Your flock would be considered a WOAH non-poultry flock.”
As expected, the vast majority of affected birds were from commercial operations. These operations with potentially massive numbers of birds can rapidly increase the affected bird count on their own. There were still quite a few WOAH non-poultry outbreaks, and between commercial and non-poultry, it covers most of the recorded outbreaks. Interestingly, the WOAH non-poultry outbreaks had nearly the smallest number of affected birds while having the second most outbreaks.
Bird Flu by Industry Affected
Our final investigation into the CDC and USDA’s numbers will be to see what industries had the largest losses. Note that the WOAH non-poultry and WOAH poultry numbers do not include exactly what type of birds were affected, so we have combined them all to form an “Other” category. Additionally, there was a single entry noted as “Commercially Raised for Release Upland Game Birds” from California that does not specify what type of upland game birds are involved, or if its multiple different species. This entry was included with “Other” as well.
In some cases we also combined different stages of the industry into one category. Such as combining turkey meat birds with turkey breeder hens and breeder replacement hens to create a Turkey Meat Industry Category.
As we mentioned at the beginning, egg prices have been a very hot topic recently. I think we can see at least part of the reason why egg prices have been rising drastically with the above data. While I am sure there is more to the story, considering over 85% of the poultry affected so far have been from the table egg industry, I can imagine that this is not helpful for the American supply of eggs.
With bird flu on the rise, we hope that scientists can find ways to slow or stop its march into American poultry operations as quickly as possible. However, at the current pace, we are on track to far outdo previous years on affected birds and outbreaks which could be extremely painful for the poultry industry, and the American consumer alike.
If you want to take a closer look at the data from the CDC and USDA, you can find it all on the CDC’s site. They helpfully include a downloadable CSV with all the data currently available. This is a great place to keep an eye on the current bird flu numbers when it comes to poultry.