Virulent Newcastle disease outbreak, California (2018-2020)
2018–2020: 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 and CDFA confirmed virulent Newcastle disease (vND) in poultry in Southern California beginning May 17, 2018, predominantly in backyard exhibition chickens. Between May 2018 and May 2020, 476 premises tested positive across six California counties (concentrated in Riverside, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles counties), including four commercial premises (table-egg layer facilities). The state-federal response quarantined more than 8,700 premises and depopulated approximately 1.2 million birds across roughly 2,400 premises. USDA-APHIS certified the United States as having met the World Organisation for Animal Health criteria for vND eradication on June 1, 2020.
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 chickenDomestically 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 chicken
In Whole chicken's 3 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
2 sources
- Epidemiologic Analyses of Virulent Newcastle Disease in Poultry in California — USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS)
- Virulent Newcastle Disease — California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA)
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.