What’s up with egg prices?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2025
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
Host Martine Powers talks with health reporter Lena Sun about the connection between bird flu and egg prices. She also explains what consumers should know about how bird flu spreads and whether the cost of eggs will drop any time soon.
Today’s show was produced by Ariel Plotnick with help from Rennie Svirnovskiy. It was edited by Lucy Perkins and mixed by Sam Bair. Thanks also to Lynh Bui.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Whenever I go grocery shopping, there are always staples I need more of. Coffee, milk, bread. There are also standard that I barely notice them on my receipt. But lately, the price of one of them has really stood out. Eggs. In some states, the average price of a dozen eggs is now more than $7. |
| 0:22.4 | And, as you might have seen, this is all because of bird flu. |
| 0:26.4 | An outbreak that up until this point, not everyone has been paying attention to, but is rapidly spreading. |
| 0:42.7 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post reports. |
| 0:49.1 | I'm Martine Powers. It's Monday, February 10th. Today, I talk with Lena Sun, who covers public health and infectious disease for the Post. She'll explain why the bird flu outbreak has made the price of eggs skyrocket and what all of us should know about how it spreads. |
| 1:04.8 | Lena, have you bought eggs recently? |
| 1:12.3 | I have, and I have been buying eggs normally every week, and I did notice the price went up. |
| 1:18.4 | And, of course, sometimes if you go in the afternoon, there are no more eggs. |
| 1:22.6 | So this weekend, I went early, and I was so thrilled to see that the price of eggs at my store was only $3.49. |
| 1:32.3 | Wow. |
| 1:32.9 | But they did have a limit on a certain type of the cage-free, you know, these are eggs that have been, you know, massaged and sung to and stuff like all this really fancy, busy eggs. |
| 1:43.2 | But I know that my neighbor was telling me that she saw eggs for $9 at her grocery store. |
| 1:49.3 | Yeah, that you've seen these prices all over the place. |
| 1:51.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:51.6 | I mean, but prices are higher for eggs, and there is going to be a shortage because this is all related to bird flu. |
| 1:58.8 | And I think the fact that you're having conversations with your neighbors |
| 2:02.1 | about like, where are you getting your eggs? What is the price that you're seeing? I mean, I think that |
| 2:05.6 | that speaks to how big a deal this has gotten for people around the country. But as you said, |
| 2:12.0 | this is because of bird flu. Tell me a little bit more about this bird flu outbreak that is making these eggs so expensive. |
| 2:20.3 | We have to go back a little bit in time. |
| 2:22.3 | This particular strain of bird flu has been around since 2022, and it's infected a lot of wild birds, migratory waterfowl, migratory birds, many, many species. |
| 2:38.6 | And the wild birds have infected poultry flocks. |
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