>The largest outbreak of avian influenza in U.S. history has driven up egg prices and raised concerns about a human pandemic, though C.D.C. experts say the risk of that is low.
Despite what the headline says bird flu does not kill many chickens, standard practice is to slaughter the flock to stop the spread since anything else tends to cause the bird flu to linger for ages and keep popping back up. Egg farms tend to become poultry farms when bird flu is about, better to sell them as meat before it hits. Here in egg country we can get poultry for ~$2 a pound. And poultry farms are less affected by bird flu since they tend to not keep their chickens around very long.