Hi, it's Diane. On my mind, bird flu. First, it hit poultry funds, forcing farmers to coal millions of hens.

Egg prices jumped, and some grocery stores began to ration the number of cartons per customer.

Next, infection spread to dairy cows, compromising milk production and stoking fears of a wider outbreak.

Now, avian fluenza has been detected in domesticated cats and humans, with about seven confirmed

cases in the U.S.

If the country doesn't do more to get a handle on how the virus is spreading, it will be harder and harder

to figure out ways to contain it. Lena's son is a staff writer for the Washington Post

covering public health and the infectious disease. She's been tracking the spread of bird flu over the last few years.

Lena, tell us when we first began seeing this strain of bird flu here in the United States

and outline the basics of where we are today.

This particular strain of bird flu has been around and globally for some time,

but it started to really pick up and infect poultry wild wild birds, starting around 2022. And if you recall

around that time, we also started to see the jump in egg prices, because bird flu is very lethal

to poultry. If a flock is infected, the virus spreads very quickly and farmers have to kill all the birds.

They call them culling or depopulating.

But it's basically you got to kill all the birds because the virus, you know, they're just not going to live.

So that happened.

And then in March of 2024, we started seeing for the first time, the virus in dairy cows.

This is a domesticated animal.

The virus has spread to many kinds of mammal species all over the world,

but it had not jumped into a domesticated animal before. I think there might have been one goat or

sheep before that, but in dairy cows, it was a big deal. And that was reported in March of 2024.

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