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Building a Timeline to keep track of Bird Flu

posted on in: context, politics and health.
~264 words, about a 2 min read.

I've been seeing Bird Flu percolate on my various news feeds starting mid-last year. It feels like with everything else that is going on, it's very hard to keep track of any one thread, but the bird flu epidemic is very concerning.

In order to help myself, and maybe you, keep track of what is happening on with the growing impact of bird flu--infecting birds, cows, and a very few humans--I've set up my second timeline, a context page for bird flu.

Back-filling some of the links from what I already had in my Pocket collection I found something really interesting. The number one reason why eggs have been so expensive is because we've been killing millions of chickens since 2022, tens of millions by now. It didn't have much to do with inflation or any of the other stuff the various political talking heads seemed to harp on during the election. Surprising! Almost all the coverage of the spread of H5N1 impacting economic conditions was isolated to local publications interviewing farmers. It didn't seem to get picked up much nationally, and not at all in the cable presidential coverage.

I'm not sure that broader reporting on bird flu (though I think we should really be getting more reporting here) would have changed the arc of the presidential election since it seems that Biden was doing a pretty terrible job dealing with the spread. It would have been nice to have a more true take on the what was causing the price of eggs to go up at the time though.

Page History

This page was first added to the repository on February 4, 2025 in commit fe0eba15. View the source on GitHub.