Raw Story

Greg Herbruck knew 6.5 million of his birds needed to die, and fast.

But the CEO of Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch wasn’t sure how the family egg producer (one of the largest in the U.S., in business for over three generations) was going to get through it, financially or emotionally. One staffer broke down in Herbruck’s office in tears.

“The mental toll on our team of dealing with that many dead chickens is just, I mean, you can’t imagine it,” Herbruck said. “I didn’t sleep. Our team didn’t sleep.”

The stress of watching tens of thousands of sick birds die of avian flu each day, while millions of others waited to be euthanized, kept everyone awake.

In April 2024, as his first hens tested positive for the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus, Herbruck turned to the tried-and-true U.S. Department of Agriculture playbook, the “stamping-out” strategy that helped end the 2014-15 bird flu outbreak, which was the largest in the U.S. until now.

Within 24 to 48 hours of the first detection of the virus, state and federal animal health officials work with farms to cull infected flocks to reduce the risk of transmission. That’s followed by extensive disinfection and months of surveillance and testing to make sure the virus isn’t still lurking somewhere on-site.

Since then, egg farms have had to invest millions of dollars into biosecurity. For instance, employees shower in and shower out, before they start working and after their shifts end, to prevent spreading any virus. But their efforts have not been enough to contain the outbreak that started three years ago.

This time, the risk to human health is only growing, experts say. Sixty-six of the 67 total human cases in the United States have been just since March, including the nation’s first human death, reported last month.

“The last six months have accelerated my concern, which was already high,” said Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious diseases physician and the founding director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Controlling this virus has become more challenging, precisely because it’s so entrenched in the global environment, spilling into mammals such as dairy cows, and affecting roughly 150 million birds in commercial and backyard flocks in the U.S.

Because laying hens are so susceptible to the H5N1 virus, which can wipe out entire flocks within days of the first infection, egg producers have been on the front lines in the fight against various bird flu strains for years. But this moment feels different. Egg producers and the American Egg Board, an industry group, are begging for a new prevention strategy.

Many infectious disease experts agree that the risks to human health of continuing current protocols are unsustainable, because of the strain of bird flu driving this outbreak.

“The one we’re battling today is unique,” said David Swayne, former director of the Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and a leading national expert in avian influenza.

“It’s not saying for sure there’s gonna be a pandemic” of H5N1, Swayne said, “but it’s saying the more human infections, the spreading into multiple mammal species is concerning.”

For Herbruck, it feels like war. Ten months after Herbruck’s Poultry Ranch was hit, the company is still rebuilding its flocks and rehired most of the 400 workers it laid off.

Still, he and his counterparts in the industry live in fear, watching other farms get hit two, even three times in the past few years.

“I call this virus a terrorist,” he said. “And we are in a battle and losing, at the moment.”

When Biosecurity Isn’t Working … or Just Isn’t Happening

So far, none of the 23 people who contracted the disease from commercial poultry have experienced severe cases, but the risks are still very real. The first human death was a Louisiana patient who had contact with both wild birds and backyard poultry. The person was over age 65 and reportedly had underlying medical conditions.

And the official message to both backyard farm enthusiasts and mega-farms has been broadly the same: Biosecurity is your best weapon against the spread of disease.

But there’s a range of opinions among backyard flock owners about how seriously to take bird flu, said Katie Ockert, a Michigan State University Extension educator who specializes in biosecurity communications.

Skeptics think that “we’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” Ockert said, or that “the media is maybe blowing it out of proportion.” This means there are two types of backyard poultry enthusiasts, Ockert said: those doing great biosecurity, and those who aren’t even trying.

“I see both,” she said. “I don’t feel like there’s really any middle ground there for people.”

And the challenges of biosecurity are completely different for backyard coops than massive commercial barns: How are hobbyists with limited time and budgets supposed to create impenetrable fortresses for their flocks, when any standing water or trees on the property could draw wild birds carrying the virus?

Rosemary Reams, an 82-year-old retired educator in Ionia, Michigan, grew up farming and has been helping the local 4-H poultry program for years, teaching kids how to raise poultry. Now, with the bird flu outbreak, “I just don’t let people go out to my barn,” she said.

Reams even swapped real birds with fake ones for kids to use while being assessed by judges at recent 4-H competitions, she said.

“We made changes to the fair last year, which I got questioned about a lot. And I said, ‘No, I gotta think about the safety of the kids.’”

Reams was shocked by the news of the death of the Louisiana backyard flock owner. She even has questioned whether she should continue to keep her own flock of 20 to 30 chickens and a pair of turkeys.

“But I love ’em. At my age, I need to be doing it. I need to be outside,” Reams said. “That’s what life is about.” She said she’ll do her best to protect herself and her 4-H kids from bird flu.

Even “the best biosecurity in the world” hasn’t been enough to save large commercial farms from infection, said Emily Metz, president and CEO of the American Egg Board.

The egg industry thought it learned how to outsmart this virus after the 2014-15 outbreak. Back then, “we were spreading it amongst ourselves between egg farms, with people, with trucks,” Metz said. So egg producers went into lockdown, she said, developing intensive biosecurity measures to try to block the routes of transmission from wild birds or other farms.

Metz said the measures egg producers are taking now are extensive.

“They have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements, everything from truck washing stations — which is washing every truck from the FedEx man to the feed truck — and everything in between: busing in workers so that there’s less foot traffic, laser light systems to prevent waterfowl from landing.”

Lateral spread, when the virus is transmitted from farm to farm, has dropped dramatically, down from 70% of cases in the last outbreak to just 15% as of April 2023, according to the USDA.

And yet, Metz said, “all the measures we’re doing are still getting beat by this virus.”

The Fight Over Vaccinating Birds

Perhaps the most contentious debate about bird flu in the poultry industry right now is whether to vaccinate flocks.

Given the mounting death toll for animals and the increasing risk to humans, there’s a growing push to vaccinate certain poultry against avian influenza, which countries like China, Egypt, and France are already doing.

In 2023, the World Organization for Animal Health urged nations to consider vaccination “as part of a broader disease prevention and control strategy.”

Swayne, the avian influenza expert and poultry veterinarian, works with WOAH and said most of his colleagues in the animal and public health world “see vaccination of poultry as a positive tool in controlling this panzootic in animals,” but also as a tool that reduces chances for human infection, and chances for additional mutations of the virus to become more human-adapted.

But vaccination could put poultry meat exporters (whose birds are genetically less susceptible to H5N1 than laying hens) at risk of losing billions of dollars in international trade deals. That’s because of concerns that vaccination, which lowers the severity of disease in poultry, could mask infections and bring the virus across borders, according to John Clifford, a former chief veterinary officer of the USDA. Clifford is currently an adviser to the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council.

“If we vaccinate, we not only lose $6 billion potentially in exports a year,” Clifford said. “If they shut us off, that product comes back on the U.S. market. Our economists looked at this and said we would lose $18 billion domestically.”

Clifford added that would also mean the loss of “over 200,000 agricultural jobs.”

Even if those trade rules changed to allow meat and eggs to be harvested from vaccinated birds, logistical hurdles remain.

“Vaccination possibly could be on the horizon in the future, but it’s not going to be tomorrow or the next day, next year, or whatever,” Clifford said.

Considering just one obstacle: No current HPAI vaccine is a perfect match for the current strain, according to the USDA. But if the virus evolves to be able to transmit efficiently from human to human, he said, “that would be a game changer for everybody, which would probably force vaccination.”

Last month, the USDA announced it would “pursue a stockpile that matches current outbreak strains” in poultry.

“While deploying a vaccine for poultry would be difficult in practice and may have trade implications, in addition to uncertainty about its effectiveness, USDA has continued to support research and development in avian vaccines,” the agency said.

At this point, Metz argued, the industry can’t afford not to try vaccination, which has helped eradicate diseases in poultry before.

“We’re desperate, and we need every possible tool,” she said. “And right now, we’re fighting this virus with at least one, if not two, arms tied behind our back. And the vaccine can be a huge hammer in our toolbox.”

But unless the federal government acts, that tool won’t be used.

Industry concerns aside, infectious diseases physician Bhadelia said there’s an urgent need to focus on reducing the risk to humans of getting infected in the first place. And that means reducing “chances of infections in animals that are around humans, which include cows and chickens. Which is why I think vaccination to me sounds like a great plan.”

The lesson “that we keep learning every single time is that if we’d acted earlier, it would have been a smaller problem,” she said.

This article is from a partnership that includes Michigan Public, NPR, and KFF Health News.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday showed that the United States economy added just 143,000 jobs in January, which missed Wall Street expectations of 169,000 jobs.

Although most of the jobs data for the month came while Joe Biden was still the president, that didn't stop President Donald Trump's critics from pouncing on the disappointing number and predicting even worse numbers in the months ahead as Trump and X owner Elon Musk attempt to enact mass layoffs of the federal workforce.

"The Trump slowdown," commented Democratic strategist Matt McDermott on X.

"Trump was president for less than half of January," wrote designer Christopher Webb. "He’s brought economic uncertainty since day one."

ALSO READ: Selfish, wasteful, and cruel': Ex-Republican slams Elon Musk's vision for government

Sirius XM radio host Dean Obeidallah echoed a similar theme on BlueSky and predicted that "with layoffs in federal government we can expect a spike in unemployment in coming months."

Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, meanwhile, put the disappointing jobs report into the broader context of what he said would be destructive Trump economic policies.

"New jobs report one of the worst since COVID - 143,000 jobs created," he wrote on BlueSky Friday. "So far under Trump: - GDP growth has slowed - Job growth has slowed - Inflation has risen - Destructive tariffs loom - Fed did not cut interest rates - GOP econ plans will explode the deficit."

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An influential Louisiana lawmaker will push for minors to be sent to adult prison for a slew of new crimes such as fentanyl distribution and robbery without a weapon if voters approve a state constitutional amendment next month.

State Rep. Debbie Villio, R-Kenner, is a former prosecutor and one of the most powerful members of the Louisiana Legislature when it comes to criminal justice policy. She is also a close ally of Gov. Jeff Landry and helped him change laws last year to significantly lengthen prison sentences.

This year, Villio hopes to dramatically extend the time behind bars 15- and 16-year-olds could experience if convicted for certain offenses. Should she get her way, minors who are currently guaranteed release at age 21 could see their time behind bars extend until they are into middle age.

Before Villio’s proposal can move forward however, voters need to approve a state constitutional amendment in the March 29 election. It would lift the state’s restrictions on what crimes can land teens under 17 in adult lockup.

As currently written, the Louisiana Constitution limits the types of offenses for which teenagers under 17 can be sent to adult prison to the state’s 14 most serious crimes. They include murder, rape, kidnapping and armed robbery.

If the amendment passes, legislators would be able to add any felony crime to that list with a two-thirds vote of each chamber.

Child advocates oppose the amendment, citing studies and criminal data showing that harsher sentences for minors don’t improve public safety or stop them from committing crimes.

Teenagers, whose brains haven’t fully developed, don’t have the same reasoning ability as adults and don’t understand the consequences of criminal behavior, said Mary Livers, who ran the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice for former Gov. Bobby Jindal.

“That’s why you have a whole juvenile justice system,” Livers said. “They don’t respond the same way to adult-type expectations.”

Teens could face decades more of prison time

Last year, Villio filed legislation that proposed more crimes for which teens could be punished as adults. It was never brought up for discussion, but the bill provides some indication about the offenses she might include in this year’s version.

In an interview this week, Villio said she is still drafting this year’s proposal and that some crimes from last year’s bill might not be included.

For example, her previous legislation would have allowed for 15- and 16-year-olds to be sent to adult prison for heroin distribution or purse snatching. Villio said this week heroin distribution wouldn’t be a focus for the new bill. Purse snatching, which carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years, was “not necessarily on [her] list at this time,” she added.

Fentanyl distribution will be included, she said, though likely only for quantities of 250 grams or more. But if adopted, it would cause one of the most dramatic upswings in sentence lengths for minors.

With an adult sentence for a first-time conviction, a 15- or 16-year-old convicted of distributing these larger amounts of fentanyl could go to adult prison for life with no possibility of release for 25 years. The sentence would be at least five times longer than the maximum incarceration of five years they currently face in the juvenile justice system.

Other offenses on Villio’s list include domestic battery with strangulation (3-50 years in prison) and attempted armed robbery (5-50 years). This would increase the maximum sentence a 15-year-old would face to 10 times the six years they can receive now.

In general, Villio will be targeting crimes that could result in “serious bodily injury,” a legal term that includes everything from a victim temporarily losing consciousness to sustaining a permanent loss of body function or disfigurement.

At least two crimes she would seek to add can be carried out without a weapon.

Minors as young as 15 can already go to adult prison for an armed robbery, including armed carjacking. Villio would like to add carjacking “by the use of force or intimidation” – without a weapon. It comes with a sentence range of five to 20 years for one violation, a maximum sentence four times longer than current guidelines for minors.

She said she would also include first-degree robbery, during which victims “reasonably believe” the perpetrator has a weapon, even if the perpetrator isn’t armed. The sentence range for this crime would be three to 40 years.

Hector Linares, who oversees the youth justice section of the law clinic at Loyola University College of Law, said robberies are some of the most prevalent offenses that bring children into juvenile court. It makes it likely that many more teenagers could wind up in adult court if Villio’s proposal is adopted, he said.

“Prosecuting a child as an adult is actually a very big deal,” Linares said.

How long is too long

Tony Clayton, district attorney for Iberville, Pointe Coupee and West Baton Rouge parishes, said the threat of additional prison time is necessary to get underage crime under control.

A Black Democrat, Clayton is nevertheless a close ally of Villio and the Republican governor when it comes to pushing for longer criminal sentences, especially for teenagers. He said younger teens are used to sell fentanyl because drug dealers known minors won’t face the same penalties people over 17 will.

When asked whether they were concerned about minors facing potentially decades-long prison sentences, both Clayton and Villio said the public needs to trust their elected officials to have good judgment.

Villio’s proposal will give district attorneys the discretion to charge 15- and 16-year-olds in either adult or juvenile court for added offenses. The public needs to trust that district attorneys will use their judgement about where youth should be sent, Clayton said.

“DAs need to be compassionate – and they are,” he said.

Villio also said people should have faith in judges to hand an appropriate length of sentence to an underage person. If judges are acting too harshly, voters will have the opportunity to vote them out of office, she said.

“I trust the legal system and I trust judges to sentence appropriately.”

Pointer, 76, was housed at the Moberly Correctional Center, where the state prison agency keeps offenders with kidney disease because it has a dialysis center, department spokeswoman Karen Pojmann wrote in an email to The Independent.

Pointer was pronounced dead at 5:13 p.m. last Friday and “had been on dialysis for many years, had been incarcerated since 2009 and had been at Moberly Correctional Center for 10 years,” Pojmann wrote.

Pointer was sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2009 after pleading guilty in the murder of his estranged wife in St. Louis.

An autopsy has been ordered, local law enforcement was notified and an investigation of the death is underway, Pojmann wrote.

Pojmann did not share any information regarding the manner of Pointer’s death. The Independent learned how he died from Déna Notz, a former corrections officer who founded an organization called Collectively Changing Corrections. Notz shared an email from a man incarcerated at the Moberly prison who saw Pointer bleeding.

“Friday night I witnessed a man I loved, James Pointer, a Vietnam veteran, bleed out from his femoral artery on a cold, dirty prison floor,” the inmate wrote. “It took medical so long to get to him that he died.”

The email was chilling, Notz said.

“It doesn’t surprise me because of all the stuff I hear,” she said,“but I still cannot believe that something like this happened.”

The description of events was confirmed by Tammy Mogab, a woman whose brother Shawn Scrivens is an insulin-dependent diabetic housed at the Moberly prison. Scrivens told a Phelps County judge he had not received an insulin shot in 124 days when he pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Mogab said she spoke to her brother on the telephone on Saturday as well as other men incarcerated at the prison.

“There are witnesses to the death of Mr. Pointer,” Mogab said, “and now all the dialysis patients are afraid to take their treatments.”

The Randolph County Ambulance District received an emergency call for the prison at 4:37 p.m. Friday and arrived on the scene at 4:49 p.m., district Superintendent Clay Joiner said.

“We did everything we could in this situation,” Joiner said.

Dialysis treats kidney failure and over time, preferred access points in a person’s arms can become scarred or otherwise unusable. A permanent catheter inserted into a blood vessel in the upper leg is a last-resort method.

Rapid bleeding can occur if the access port at the end of the tube becomes dislodged and there is no clamp to close off the tube.

The femoral artery is one of the largest in the human body. A person can bleed to death in 2 to 5 minutes if no action is taken to staunch the flow of blood.

Joiner said he has responded to similar emergencies among dialysis patients in their homes.

“When your femoral artery is bleeding out, you have very little time,” Joiner said.

Randolph County Coroner Charlie Peel will rule on the cause of death for Pointer. He said that he is not ready to release any information about what he observed or was told by the department.

“We are in the middle of an investigation,” Peel said.

Many of the autopsies on people who die in the custody of the department are conducted at the Boone County Medical Examiner’s office in Columbia. Autopsy records obtained by The Independent for deaths at the Algoa and Jefferson City correctional centers show that in the past two years, the time elapsed from the date of the death to a completed report has ranged from 30 to more than 250 days.

There were 11 deaths at Moberly Correctional Center in 2024, fifth most among the 19 adult prisons operated by the department. The prison system recorded 139 deaths in 2024, the highest number of deaths in custody in its history.

The inmate who wrote to Notz stated that it was the fourth time in the past month that Pointer’s access point opened. He blamed medical staff working for contractor Centurion Health, not department officers.

“How inept does a nurse have to be, does a company have to be, to allow this man to bleed out of an open artery four times in one month?” the inmate wrote. “DOC staff is not to blame for this atrocity. Medical staff is responsible and they alone must pay.”

Health care in Missouri’s prisons is performed by Centurion Health under a contract, recently renegotiated, that pays the company $21.65 per day for each person in custody.

The state will pay Centurion approximately $203 million in the coming fiscal year, an increase of about 11% from the previous rate.

Centurion did not respond to telephone and email messages seeking comment.

Thousands of federal workers are set to be purged by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to a report.

The forthcoming executive order intends to fire "thousands" of employees, those familiar told the Wall Street Journal.

The firings will come from the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies under the HHS umbrella, according to the report.

ALSO READ: 'Making America less safe': Democrats warn of disaster as Trump purges the CIA

The goal is to reach a "percentage of employees" that must be purged out of the 80,000-person workforce.

Those familiar with the matter told the Journal they've been offered an opportunity to resign but get their pay and benefits for the next eight months. It's a similar agreement given to other agencies. However, public sector unions say the agreements have confusing fine print.

The details of the health worker purge have yet to be completed, but the report said the order is expected next week.

"The agencies are responsible for a range of functions, from approving new drugs to tracing bird-flu outbreaks and researching cancer," said The Journal report. "A loss of staff could affect the efforts depending on which workers are cut and whether they are concentrated in particular areas."

The White House has denied the report.

by Daniel AVIS / Sebastian Smith

More than two million U.S. federal workers were hours away from a deadline Thursday to quit with eight months' pay or risk being fired on the spot in a plan by billionaire Elon Musk to gut the civil service.

Musk, the world's richest person and a top donor to President Donald Trump, is in charge of a free-ranging Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that aims to radically downsize federal agencies.

The most dramatic element so far has been a push to encourage employees to leave by midnight Thursday. According to US media, a small proportion of staffers -- up to 40,000 -- had so far accepted the deal.

The initiative has caused consternation among government workers, who face daily verbal attacks by Trump administration officials.

Unions and Democrats have challenged the legality of threats to fire civil servants.

A federal judge in Massachusetts was to hold a hearing Thursday on a lawsuit by labor unions requesting an injunction against Musk's midnight deadline. The unions backing the suit represent some 800,000 civil servants.

But the campaign has already severely disrupted the huge departments and agencies that for decades have run everything from education to national intelligence.

USAID, the government's huge agency for distributing aid around the world, has been crippled, with foreign-based staff ordered home and the organization's programs lambasted as wasteful by the White House and right-wing media.

Trump has also repeatedly said he wants to shut down the Department of Education, while Musk aides have stoked controversy by accessing a tightly guarded Treasury Department payment system.

The inducements to resign have even been extended to the CIA.

According to a report in The New York Times, the agency sent a list of the most junior -- and easiest to fire -- officers to the White House.

The Times reported that the list gave only their first names and initials of their surnames, but was sent in an unclassified email, sparking concerns that their identities could easily be discovered by foreign adversaries.

In another sign of the scale of cuts intended by Musk's team, an official with the agency that manages government property said the real estate portfolio, barring Department of Defense buildings, should be cut by "at least 50 percent."

- Buyout questions -

Workers considering the buyout offer face considerable uncertainty, including over whether Trump has the legal right to make the offer and whether the conditions will be honored.

The plan was first announced in an email sent across most of the vast government and titled "Fork in the road" -- the same as one Musk sent to all employees at Twitter when he bought the social media platform in 2022 and renamed it X.

Musk says the paid departures are a chance to "take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits."

But unions warn that without Congress signing off on the use of federally budgeted money, the agreements may be worthless.

"Federal employees shouldn't be misled by slick talk from unelected billionaires and their lackeys," Everett Kelley, president of the large American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said in a swipe at Musk.

"Despite claims made to the contrary, this deferred resignation scheme is unfunded, unlawful and comes with no guarantees. We won't stand by and let our members become the victims of this con."

The Massachusetts lawsuit also casts doubt on assertions that workers would be free to look for other jobs during their deferment periods, citing ethics regulations.

An employee in the US Office of Personnel Management, where Musk has put his own staff in key positions, said the plan was to encourage resignations through "panic."

"It's not like we're pursuing some orderly measure to reduce the size of government," the employee told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"We're trying to instill a panic so that people just walk out the door and leave government in a crippled state, which is partly their objective."

© Agence France-Presse