2014-2015 highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak
2014–2015: a documented market event that overlapped the wholesale price windows of 2 tracked ingredients — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.
What happened
USDA APHIS documented a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI, H5N2/H5N8/H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4) epizootic in US poultry between December 2014 and June 2015 — the largest animal-health emergency in US history at that time. APHIS recorded 232 HPAI detections in domestic flocks across 15 states (211 of them in commercial operations), leading to the depopulation of about 50.4 million birds, including roughly 43.0 million table-egg layers and pullets and about 7.4 million turkeys. Estimated economic impacts exceeded $3 billion. Commercial broiler chicken flocks were largely unaffected.
Documented account from our open, cited registry (sources below). Shown as context beside the price record — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.
Affected ingredients
Why these ingredients were exposed
Each affected ingredient's public supply structure — where it comes from and how much it leans on imports. Context that makes the co-occurrence with a documented event legible, never its cause.
- EggsDomestically sourced comes almost entirely from domestic production, with little import buffer. Its exposure runs through domestic production structure, not import origins — a domestic event overlaps its price window.
- Whole turkeyDomestically sourced comes almost entirely from domestic production, with little import buffer. Its exposure runs through domestic production structure, not import origins — a domestic event overlaps its price window.
It explains why an ingredient sits in the path of a documented event — not that the event caused any price move. Co-occurrence in time, never a cause.
The detected moves that overlapped
Each figure is a wholesale reference against its own ±26-week normal — a market move, never a delivered price.
No sustained wholesale move in our detected set falls inside this event's window. The event is documented; our public price series simply didn't flag a notable departure from normal for these ingredients then — an honest absence, not a hidden one.
What moved together
Co-occurrence, not cause
Eggs
In Eggs's 4 notable moves, these ingredients ran the same direction in the same weeks:
Whole turkey
In Whole turkey's 1 notable moves, these ingredients ran the same direction in the same weeks:
Moving in the same weeks is not one thing causing another — many of these share a growing region, a shipping lane, or an aisle. It is a directed, bounded count: in K of an ingredient's own notable moves, another ran the same way.
Sources
3 sources
- Final Report for the 2014-2015 Outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in the United States — USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)
- Avian Influenza: USDA Has Taken Actions to Reduce Risks but Needs a Plan to Evaluate Its Efforts (GAO-17-360) — U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)
- Egg Price Impacts of the 2014-15 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Outbreak — USDA Economic Research Service (ERS)
Documented events come from our open, cited registry (CC‑BY). Price moves are detected from public history (USDA/BLS/FRED) and shown as co-occurring context, never asserted as the cause. How events are picked.