Customers in Louisiana and nationwide are dealing with egg prices going up and sparsely populated aisles at the grocery store following the spread of the bird flu in the U.S.

Seven Delmarva-region commercial operations have now reported cases of the highly contagious virus.

"The Chinese poultry lineage may have experienced more vaccine-driven selection compared to other lineages," the researchers wrote.

Avian flu is rampant in poultry farms and in wild birds in the U.S. Every mutation brings the virus one step closer to the brink of human-to-human transmission, but predicting whether a virus will cross that threshold remains an uncertain science.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says hospitals treating people for the flu should test them for avian influenza within 24 hours.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is urging health care workers to accelerate bird flu testing for patients hospitalized with flu symptoms.

There have been 14 recorded cases of avian influenza among humans in Washington, but none in Clark County. Local health officials still consider the risk to the general public to be low.

Public-health officials are now comparing the genetic features of the teen’s case with that of a Louisiana patient whose death this week was the first reported to be attributed to H5N1 in the U.S.

The case of the Canadian teen and the death of a Louisiana man are stark reminders of bird flu’s capacity to ignite serious illness.

How deadly is the bird flu? The US has reported its first death from avian influenza, H5N1. Here's what to know about bird flu mortality rate and who is at risk.

For the first time, birds in a Wayne County backyard flock have been sickened by the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus, MDARD reported.

A detection in a sample collected on Dec. 11 was so low that it wasn’t considered a positive. Samples collected on Dec. 18 and Jan. 8 also had similar low detections.