Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore.

Our goal is to bring evidence and experience to illuminate critical public health issues.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.org

that's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Stephanie Desmond.

Today, Johns Hopkins veterinarian Megan Davis joins me to discuss the avian flu outbreak

that has been threatening birds and the food supply since 2021, an unusually long time span.

She tells me about its impact on wild birds, the poultry and egg industries.

You're not imagining those prices going up and on humans.

Let's listen.

Megan Davis, thanks so much for joining me.

It's a pleasure.

So today the topic is avian flu.

And we've been seeing a lot of talk about it in the news.

And I guess my first question is, why are we hearing so much about it? What's been going on?

So avian flu is nothing new in terms of the virus. It's been around for a while. We've seen this as a recurring problem in wild birds and also in domestic poultry, which can include chickens,

turkeys, et cetera.

They can be raised for meat, so broilers, or they can be layers and produce eggs.

What's different about this outbreak is how long it's been going on.

So normally with avian flu, and we call this high path avian flu,

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