The OP title is the question. You have a hen in your yard. The vet confirms that, yep, your hen has avian flu. Your hen still lays a few eggs. You collect the eggs, and decide to make them into scrambled eggs.
There’s nothing amiss here for the human eating those eggs, correct? The cooking heat conclusively kills any influenza virus that might be transmitted via eggs, one may assume? Or no?
That suggests a larger question: Could the overall poultry-and-egg industry just “shrug off” the avian flu by simply allowing sick hens to lay eggs – and for the eggs to continue to be collected and sold to consumers? I know this violates a ton of regulations – I mean in some kind of hypothetical fantasy land of deregulated food sales to the public.
Or is it simply that sick hens don’t lay eggs?
Actually … I don’t think I understand “a few hens here have avian flu, so we have to destroy all 10,000 hens”. Are we quite sure–quite sure, now–that letting the hens recover from the flu and carrying on isn’t a viable path? Or don’t they recover from flu? For the hens, we may assume that the avian flu is not two weeks of crud and then getting fully better again?
This is the part that puts you at risk of cross-species transmission of the virus, not so much anything to do with the eggs - it’s the fact that there’s an infected bird that you (presumably) are regularly exposed to close contact with, when you feed and water it, when you clean out the henhouse, etc.
Also, wild birds visiting the garden are likely to catch the virus and transmit it elsewhere.
I think that it’s that a large enough fraction of them die, that it’s really unprofitable for your hens to get it. So much so that, if any of them do, it’s more economical to kill all of the hens that are even potentially affected than to let the disease take hold and spread.
That begs the question: How does avian flu typically affect a hen? Two weeks of crud and then a full recovery? Or certain death?
I’m gathering that influenza is not (generally) the same thing to a human and to a chicken, but I don’t know the details.
Here’s some info from the CDC. It basically says that bird flu is often not serious for birds, but that non-serious, ‘low-pathogenic’ forms of flu readily mutate into highly pathogenic forms that cause severe illness and death. Both low and highly pathogenic forms can mutate into forms that can affect humans.
It seems like is just not worth it to nurse chickens back to health even if they are only mildly sick, given the risk of the virus mutating into something much nastier.
Perhaps also worth noting that in birds, there is often a significant discrepancy between ‘looks sick’ and ‘is sick’.
Birds instinctively hide symptoms of illness, because predators tend to pick out weakened individuals - so a sick bird might appear normal for a while, then after days or weeks (when it can no longer maintain the pretence) go into sudden decline and die within hours - in reality, it was sick all along.
A bald eagle succumbed to the bird flu in the area last week. It was grounded and acting strangely, on top of being an unusual eagle in a heavily developed suburban area to begin with. Too bad, that’s a very handsome bird in the photos.
Edit: succumbed, though euthanized. I have got to assume the eagle was not going to recover.