He considers his 18-acre farm one of the lucky ones. With extensive safety precautions, he hasn’t lost any birds to the virus, which has ravaged poultry farms across the US.

But the outbreak forced him to make tough calls, like deciding whether to accept a new batch of baby chicks from a hatchery near a virus hotspot in Pennsylvania. If he didn’t, he would have no chickens to replace those that die or get sick.

“I had no choice,” Kreher told the BBC. “It was either accept those baby chicks, or over the next year, we slowly exit farming.”

“Egg farmers are in the fight of our lives and we are losing,” he said.

Though the avian flu, or H5N1, has circulated among American poultry flocks for years, an outbreak starting in 2022 has wreaked havoc on farms, killing over 156 million birds and sending egg prices skyrocketing. The virus then got a foothold among dairy cows last year, and this month, a different strain – tied to severe infections in humans – was found in the cattle.

The worsening outbreak comes as President Donald Trump’s new administration makes sweeping cuts to government staffing and research funding that public health experts say threatens the country’s ability to respond to bird flu and other potential pandemics.

This week, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) told the BBC it fired several officials who were working on the response to bird flu before trying to hire them back days later. The administration also promised billions in funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which scientists say could hamper research that helps them understand the evolution of viruses.

“Right now, the risk to most Americans remains low, but the virus is continuing to surprise us, and so that could change, and could change quickly,” said Michaela Simoneau, a global health security fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“I worry, as all of these funding cuts are in the political conversation, that we don’t cut those programs that have been shown to be most essential.”

Trump officials said they are working on a new plan to respond to bird flu, one that includes more safety precautions and vaccines while moving away from culling – a process where farmers kill all their birds after one flock becomes infected to prevent the spread of the highly contagious and fatal disease.

When asked for details about the new strategy, the White House did not provide specifics to the BBC, but said Joe Biden’s administration had “crushed American agriculture with regulatory uncertainty”, inflation and “radical environmental policies”.

Scientists have seen a number of warning signs in recent months that the avian flu is adapting to infect humans, said Andrew Pekosz, a molecular biology professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Influenza viruses don’t typically grow well in mammals, so the length of time the virus has circulated in dairy cows is concerning because it allows more opportunities to evolve, Mr Pekosz said.

Bird flu infected cattle for the first time ever in the US at the beginning of last year. Since then, there have been nearly 1,000 confirmed cases across 17 states. There also have been 68 confirmed cases among humans, most of whom worked closely with animals.

Then, in February, a new variant of the virus – called D1.1 – was detected in dairy cows and an infected worker in Nevada for the first time. The strain also caused two severe infections in humans in North America, a teenager in hospital in British Columbia and a patient in Louisiana who died from the virus.

The new variant also means there are now at least two instances in which cows have caught the virus from wild birds, and not other dairy herds.

“We’re seeing these little red flags, real signs that the virus is making some inroads,” Mr Pekosz said.

The virus has upended poultry and dairy farms where workers have had to kill millions of birds to prevent more infections. It’s a battle US consumers have felt at the grocery store and a recurring theme during the presidential campaign – in January, the average cost of eggs in the US rose more than 15% from a year ago, to $4.95 a dozen.

Mr Kreher said that despite a host of security measures, including washing vehicles on farms, wearing steel-toed boots and using lasers to deter wild birds, the outbreak continues to worsen across the country.

Bird flu “is on our minds from the moment we get up to the moment we sleep, if sleep comes”, he said. “We need new strategies to fight this virus.

California poultry farmer Christian Alexandre has seen firsthand the financial and emotional devastation of a bird flu outbreak. In 2022, he had to kill all 45,000 of his chickens when the virus spread at his family farm near the Oregon border.

“It was extremely painful,” said Mr Alexandre, president of the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association.

In response to soaring egg prices, Trump officials now say they want to move away from the slaughtering, focusing instead on preventative measures.

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, told the BBC’s US partner CBS News last week that he is working on a plan with newly confirmed USDA leader Brooke Rollins to combat the virus “with biosecurity and medication”.

“Rollins and I have been working with all the best people in government, including academics around the country and around the world, to have a plan ready for the president next week,” Hassett said.

Mr Alexandre said he was not sure that vaccinations and other precautions could replace the need to cull flocks – but he said new ideas were desperately needed.

“What farmers and the USDA have been doing has just obviously not worked,” he said. “We’re in a crisis.”

Vaccines for birds against the avian flu already exist in countries around the world, and last week, the USDA granted conditional approval to a new shot developed by Zoetis.

Still, many poultry industry groups oppose vaccinating birds against the virus. This is because most countries don’t accept exports of poultry that are vaccinated because of fears that it masks the presence of the virus, said Tom Super of the National Chicken Council.

Public health experts have been critical of the US government’s response to bird flu since the virus first spread to dairy cows, arguing Biden officials fell short in their disease surveillance efforts.

But Trump’s team has slowed communications about the disease, which also concerns public health experts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reportedly withheld weekly reports on bird flu and canceled weeks of briefings with lawmakers and state health officials.

“I haven’t seen anything from this administration that would say that they’re taking this outbreak any more seriously,” Mr Pekosz said.

Ms Simoneau sees one encouraging sign from the Trump administration: Gerald Parker, a bird flu expert, veterinarian and former top-ranking health official, was chosen to lead the White House’s Pandemic Office.

At the same time, she said, the wide cuts and the decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization under Trump’s leadership could hamper efforts to respond to H5N1.

“We’re cutting ourselves off from that global information system at a time when we really need all of those signals that we can get,” she said.

Ms Simoneau said fatigue and a decrease in trust in public health officials following the Covid pandemic makes for a difficult environment for any administration to respond to a potential health crisis. But, she said, the threat is one Trump officials should take seriously.

“We don’t know if this could be an emergency for humans next week, or if it could be several months from now, or if it might not happen at all,” Ms Simoneau said. “But taking your eye off the ball isn’t really an option.”

The layoffs were a part of a cost-cutting mission across the US government by Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) leader Elon Musk.

The terminations came as the latest outbreak of the bird flu has wreaked havoc on poultry and cattle farms, causing egg prices to skyrocket and raising concerns among public health experts.

A USDA spokesperson told US media that although “several” officials working on bird flu were “notified of their terminations” over the weekend, “we are working to swiftly rectify the situation and rescind those letters”.

“USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service frontline positions are considered public safety positions, and we are continuing to hire the workforce necessary to ensure the safety and adequate supply of food to fulfil our statutory mission,” the spokesperson added, as quoted by NBC.

Bird flu has circulated among American poultry flocks for years, but the virus found a new foothold in the US last year when it began to infect dairy cows.

Since then, dozens of humans in close contact with the animals have been infected as well, including a Louisiana patient who was the first to die from the virus in the US last month.

At the same time, the outbreak has worsened on poultry farms, forcing farmers to cull their chickens, leading to egg shortages and high prices.

Earlier this week, the US reached an agreement to buy 15,000 tonnes of liquid egg from Turkey to help plug the shortage, a Turkish trade official told the BBC.

Ibrahim Afyon, the president of the Egg Producers Central Union in Turkey, said the egg products would be sent to the US in two batches by the end of June.

Trump launched his mass cost-cutting programme in an effort to weed out what he sees as taxpayers’ money being wasted. Polling suggests cutting government spending has widespread support.

But the USDA firings are not the first time the administration has attempted to rehire federal employees within days of laying them off.

After firing officials with the National Nuclear Security Administration last week, US media reported that the government was trying to reinstate some of those employees, but was struggling to get in contact with them.

The layoffs were in addition to an estimated 75,000 workers who have accepted buyout offers from the White House to leave voluntarily.

Several Democratic states have filed lawsuits attempting to block some of these mass government layoffs as well as the newly formed Doge’s access to sensitive data.

But in a victory for Trump and Musk, US District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected one of these requests on Tuesday, arguing Democratic states had failed to link Trump’s layoffs to “imminent harm” in their states.

Trump and Musk appeared on Fox News on Tuesday night to defend the mass cuts they are making across the government, with Musk claiming Doge is just trying to “restore the will of the people through the president”.

“What we’re finding is that there’s an unelected bureaucracy,” he said.

The patient had been taken to hospital after contracting a major strain of bird flu, known as H5N1.

Louisiana health department said they were over the age of 65, and had other underlying health conditions.

It said their public health investigation had not found evidence of person-to-person transmission, or any other cases.

Bird flu is a disease caused by a virus that infects birds and sometimes other animals, such as foxes, seals and otters. In very rare cases, it can also infect humans.

The state’s health department added the person had contracted bird flu after being exposed to a personal flock of birds and wild birds.

“While the current public health risk for the general public remains low, people who work with birds, poultry or cows, or have recreational exposure to them, are at higher risk,” it said.

There have been 66 confirmed cases of H5N1 bird flu in the US since 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Bird flu is a disease caused by a virus that infects birds, and sometimes other animals. Bird migration has resulted in outbreaks of the avian flu in domestic and wild birds.

The H5N1 virus is the major strain circulating among wild birds worldwide, and emerged in China in the late 1990s.Although infection of humans is very rare, it occurs via transmission from birds.

Almost all cases of infection in people have been associated with close contact to infected dead or live birds, or contaminated environments.

Since 2003, the World Health Organization (WHO) has counted 954 confirmed human cases of bird flu, of which about half have died.

There has been no sustained human-to-human transmission.

Last month, the CDC said the Louisiana patient had been infected with the D1.1variant of the virus, which has recently been detected in North America.

A 13-year-old girl in Canada was taken to hospital with the same D1.1 variant in November 2024, according to a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

It is different to the B3.13 variant, which – during the past year – has been on the rise among cows in the US.

In September 2024, a person in Missouri recovered from bird flu after being treated in hospital.

Bird flu symptomsAccording to the WHO, symptoms of a H5N1 infection include a cough, sore throat, fever (often over 38C), muscle aches and general feelings of malaise.

People with the virus may also display other non-respiratory symptoms such as conjunctivitis.

The WHO added that H5N1 has also been detected in people without symptoms who had contact with infected animals or their environments.

While the risk to humans is low, the constantly evolving virus is monitored for all changes, including the potential to become easily transmissible from person to person.

The animals died between late November and mid-December, the sanctuary’s director, Mark Mathews, told the New York Times.”We’ve never had anything like it; they usually die basically of old age,” he said. “Not something like this, it’s a pretty wicked virus.”The news comes as bird flu continues to spread among cattle and poultry in the US, while also severely infecting at least one human.The sanctuary said it had lost five African serval cats, four bobcats, two Canada lynx and a Bengal tiger, among others. Only 17 cats now remain at the Center.”Cats are particularly vulnerable to this virus, which can cause subtle initial symptoms but progress rapidly, often resulting in death within 24 hours due to pneumonia-like conditions,” the sanctuary said in its Facebook statement on Friday.Bird flu has long infected poultry flocks in the US. But the virus began to infect cattle in the US for the first time in March.And since April 2024, there have been a total of 61 human cases of bird flu reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The CDC says that the risk to the general public remains low, and there has been no sustained human-to-human transmission.Most have reported mild symptoms, though one person was taken to the hospital with a severe case of bird flu in Louisiana this month.Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared an emergency over the outbreak among the state’s dairy cows to help the government have the “resources and flexibility they need to respond quickly to this outbreak”.

As part of the mandate, entities and firms that handle raw milk – such as dairy processors – must collect samples to share with agriculture officials.

The announcement comes as US authorities seek to stem the rapid spread of bird flu in US dairy herds.

More than 700 dairy herds have been infected across the country since March, mostly in California, government statistics show.

Nearly 60 people have also contracted the virus since April, albeit with mild symptoms. The virus does not spread easily among humans.

Health bodies such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) consider the overall public health risk from bird flu to be low. But scientists say we need to keep a close eye on the spread of the virus.In a statement published on Friday, the Department of Agriculture – the USDA – said that the campaign is aimed at “swiftly and diligently” identifying affected dairy herds.

“Among many outcomes, this will give farmers and farmworkers better confidence in the safety of their animals and ability to protect themselves,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in the statement.

“It will put us on a path to quickly controlling and stopping the virus’ spread nationwide,” he added.

The testing plan will involve monthly or weekly sample collections, and will initially be rolled out in California, Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Oregon.

Mr Vilsack told Reuters news agency that the initial round of testing will begin on 16 December.

In a separate federal mandate published in April, the USDA said that milk-producing cows must be tested before they are moved between states.The new order does not supersede or override the April mandate, but is instead intended to “complement and enhance” it.

A total of 57 human cases of bird flu have been confirmed in seven US states this year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In September, US officials confirmed a human case of the disease that had no known animal exposure. The patient, in the state of Missouri, was treated in hospital and has since recovered, the CDC said.

Just this Friday, Arizona confirmed its first human cases of bird flu. The two people both tested positive after working with poultry, and state officials said the risk to the public remains low.

Bird flu was first detected in China in the 1990s, and has since spread across every continent including Antarctica. World health officials believe the current risk to humans is low, but have actively monitored the disease for years.

The disease has affected wildlife worldwide, infecting species as varied as sea lions, seals and bears.