The North American poultry industry reached an unwanted milestone when chickens at a Cal-Maine Foods farm in Texas were infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).
The company confirmed on April 2 that it depopulated 1.6 million laying hens and 337,000 pullets at its facility in Parmer County. Those numbers were also reported by Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.
When you add those numbers to the pre-existing total of commercial birds in the United States, Canada and Mexico that have been lost to HPAI during the 2022-24 outbreak, it surpasses 100 million.
According to totals tallied by WATT Global Media, 101,252,211 birds have been lost.
While this total includes losses in commercial gamebird operations, it does not include backyard poultry, birds at live markets or wild birds.
Most of those losses have been in the United States, with that country’s total standing at 83,348,284. Bird losses for Canada amount to 10,976,302, while the total number of birds reported lost in Mexico is 6,927,629.
The totals for the United States are based on figures provided by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), as well as state agriculture agencies and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH).
Regarding Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) offers numbers concerning when commercial flocks are affected by HPAI, but those reports do not offer bird loss numbers. That information is provided by WOAH.
Bird loss numbers for Mexican poultry flocks are also reported by WOAH.
Unreported losses
The number of commercial birds reported lost to date in those three countries does not reflect all bird deaths. On the same day Cal-Maine Foods reported its losses in Texas, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) reported that a commercial poultry flock in Ionia County had been affected by HPAI. However, the agency has not yet reported the number of birds lost at that farm, nor has APHIS or WOAH.
To learn more about HPAI cases in commercial poultry flocks in the United States, Mexico and Canada, see an interactive map on WATTPoultry.com.
View our continuing coverage of the global avian influenza situation.
