Why Aren’t Egg Prices High In Neibouring Mexico and Canada?

I was scrolling on Facebook and I saw a Buzzfeed article on how Americans discovering that eggs are cheaper in neighboring Canada. I decided to look into it and I discovered that it’s because they don’t have bird flu outbreaks. Why? It’s ridiculous but besides Mexico and Canada having smaller, more spread out heard that limit spread, the main reason is that the US does not vaccinate chickens against bird flu.

Why not? As Vox explains, money¹.

The biggest sticking point is around trade. The US exported more than $5 billion in poultry meat and products on average every year for the past three years. The USDA enters into trade agreements with each individual country it trades with, explained Upali Galketi Aratchilage, a senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Each agreement outlines specific biosafety and production requirements that both countries agree to follow. The USDA said, in an email to Vox, that many of those agreements do not allow bird flu vaccination. For now, biosecurity is the best defense against HPAI,a USDA spokesperson wrote.

Note: HPAI is bird flu.

The reason for the ban are mostly outdated concerns like being worried that the chicken might be infected and they can’t tell if a chicken is infected or if it just has antibodies. Thing is, we can detect these now through better testing.

Markets have been negotiated based on not using vaccination … based on, frankly, older data [that] there could be a chance that you would import the virus in an animal or in a product that has vaccine in it, Cardona [, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine] said.

A lot of places, like Mexico and France only got around to doing this recently since current containment measures (mainly culling flocks) were failing.

The other reason is that vaccinating all the chickens for bird flu is too damn hard since they currently rely on two doses. Again, an outdated problem because there are many ways of getting chickens vaccinated, like air and water supply.

Honestly, the US should just cut the shitty excuses and get on with it like other places have. Can’t imagine this work costs more than the money you’ll lose having to cull an entire flock.

Imagine that, a fucking Facebook post has taken an hour of my life to look into.