An outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 could impact the dairy cattle sector and the broader economy in the United States
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The outbreak of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 in U.S. dairy cattle poses substantial risks to public health, economic sustainability of farming, and global food systems. Using a Computable General Equilibrium model, we simulate its short- to medium-term impacts on Gross Domestic Product and other macro-economic outcomes for the US and its main trading partners. We simulate impacts under the current situation and realistic and reasonable worst-case scenarios. We estimate domestic economic losses ranging between 0.06% and 0.9% of US GDP, with losses to the dairy sector ranging between 3.4% and 20.6%. Trading partners increase dairy production to compensate for the loss. Current government subsidies are about 1.2% (95% HDI: 1% to 1.4%) of output losses, and likely insufficient to incentivise farmers to step up surveillance and biosecurity for mitigating the possible emergence of H5N1 strains with pandemic potential into human populations.
Date Issued
2026-02-06
Date Acceptance
2025-12-19
Citation
Communications Earth & Environment, 2026, 7
ISSN
2662-4435
Publisher
Nature Portfolio
Journal / Book Title
Communications Earth & Environment
Volume
7
Copyright Statement
©The Author(s) 2026 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
135
Date Publish Online
2026-01-27