“In one groundbreaking 2022 study conducted at NYU Langone Fertility Center and looking at 543 patients over 15 years, the chance of a live birth from frozen eggs was 39 percent. “There isn’t a guarantee of having a baby from egg freezing,” says Sarah Druckenmiller Cascante, a reproductive endocrinologist at NYU Langone Fertility Center and one of the study’s authors. The study made a splash because it provided numbers where little comprehensive national data exists, though experts at other clinics tell Vox that its results are in line with what they’ve found.”
https://www.vox.com/health/24141538/egg-freezing-cost-age-ivf-fertility-pregnancy
“The egg industry, like much of the agricultural sector, is commanded by a few heavyweights — the biggest, Cal-Maine Foods, controls 20 percent of the market — that leave little slack in the system to absorb and isolate shocks like disease.
Hundreds of thousands of animals are packed tightly together on a single farm, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has explained, where disease can spread like wildfire. According to the government and corporate accountability group Food & Water Watch, three-quarters of the country’s hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens are crammed into just 347 factory farms.
The system also uses genetically similar animals that farms believe will maximize egg production — but that lack of genetic diversity means animal populations are less resistant to disease.
When a hen gets infected, stopping the spread is an ugly, cruel business; since 2022 it has led to the killing of 85 million poultry birds. For the consumer, it often means paying a lot more than usual for a carton of eggs.
Preventing any outbreaks of disease from ever happening isn’t realistic, but the model of modern industrial farming is making outbreaks more disruptive.
And it’s not just these disruptions driving price spikes. Egg producers also appear to be taking advantage of these moments and hiking prices beyond what they’d need to maintain their old profit margins.”
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“Because our food system is so concentrated and intermingled, it also means any single supply chain hiccup — whether due to disease, wars, or any other reason — can have ripple effects on others, affecting prices in a vast number of essential consumer goods and services.”
https://www.vox.com/money/24144715/egg-price-inflation-bird-flu-corporate-greed
“An avian flu outbreak devastated the poultry industry throughout 2022. By the end of the year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), there were 43 million fewer egg-laying hens than in February 2022. Egg inventories fell 29 percent from January to December. When demand outstrips supply, prices go up.
A similar outbreak in late 2014 affected more than 50 million birds. According to Fed data, egg prices rose from $1.96 a dozen in May 2015 to $2.96 in September 2015 before falling for more than a year afterward.
The 2022 outbreak, by contrast, persisted into 2023. At the same time, general inflation was unusually high: 6.5 percent in 2022, compared to 0.7 percent in 2015. “Like consumers,” the American Feed Industry Association noted in January 2023, “feed manufacturers are feeling the effects of inflation on the economy and are paying increased rates for energy, shipping, labor and ingredients.” So even as the number of hens dropped, the cost of feeding them rose.
The good news is that egg prices began falling after January’s high. Average egg prices fell from $4.82 a dozen in January to $4.21 in February and $3.45 in March. The USDA predicted that, barring an avian flu resurgence, prices would continue to fall throughout the year.”
“A widespread avian flu outbreak devastated the poultry industry in 2022, causing the deaths of more than 43 million hens. December egg inventories were down nearly 30 percent from the year before, just in time for the holiday baking season. Under the basic rules of economics, a persistent drop in supply leading into a time of increased demand is bound to have this result.”
“The squeeze on eggs is so bad that some grocery stores are reporting shortages, and some are even limiting the number of cartons customers can purchase.
It’s a significant change for what’s long been a reliably cheap staple, and there’s one major culprit: the bird flu.”
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“The last year has brought the worst bird flu outbreak in US history, and there are no signs it’s going to relent soon. Some 57.8 million birds in the US — mostly egg-laying hens — have died as a result of bird flu outbreaks surpassing the previous record of 50.5 million in 2015, and it’s not letting up. Just in the 10 days prior to Christmas, 1.5 million egg-laying hens died.
The virus is expected to continue to circulate among wild birds and the ones we raise for food for the duration of winter, meaning egg prices — along with prices for turkey — could remain high for the foreseeable future.”
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“most victims don’t die from the virus itself. Rather, they’re culled, or proactively killed, in a brutal effort to prevent the virus from doing even more damage.”
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“a major reason why bird flu is so destructive in the US is that factory farms — with so many chickens and turkeys in such close quarters — are the perfect playing field for the virus, which is why farmers are so quick to cull infected flocks. But that very fact raises a simple, but surprisingly controversial question: If avian flu is so deadly and so economically destructive, why on earth aren’t we vaccinating birds against the virus?”
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“For countries in which poultry exports make up a big share of the industry’s revenue — such as the US and many European countries — vaccines have largely been a nonstarter, even though they have the potential to severely limit the death toll of mass culling. Why? Blame the “DIVA” problem.
DIVA is short for “differentiating infected from vaccinated animals” — the challenge of identifying whether a bird is actually infected with avian influenza, or just has avian influenza antibodies after vaccination. Countries fear that importing eggs or slaughtered meat from vaccinated birds in countries where the virus is circulating could inadvertently spread it within their own borders by introducing the virus to wild or domesticated animals through discarded raw meat. That means that big poultry exporters like the US — which sends 18 percent of its poultry abroad — don’t vaccinate, for fear they’ll miss out on a huge part of their revenue: international trade.”
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“without international coordination and predictable vaccine use, it doesn’t make economic sense for vaccine makers to invest in developing vaccines that protect against the bird flu. “We’re not going to make [massive investments] unless we’ve got major markets on board,” said du Marchie Sarvaas. “And the only way you’re going to get major markets on board is if you get some sort of political deal. And that comes to the trade point and the export point.””
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“It’s also a geopolitical coordination challenge, a classic game theory problem where no major poultry-producing country wants to be the first to vaccinate. As a result, everyone sticks with the kill ’em all approach.”