News from rural America.

As bird flu spreads, egg prices continue to soar, wildfires are not stopping Americans from moving to wildfire-prone states, and post-pandemic infrastructure is not just roads and bridges but also education, healthcare, and economic opportunity.

TRANSCRIPT

♪♪ For the Daily Yonder and Public News Service, this is the news from rural America.

The latest bird flu outbreak first showed up on a California duck farm last November.

Since then, it's killed more than 20 million egg-laying hens.

The industry says the highly contagious H5N9 virus is behind high grocery store egg costs, and it's in U.S. cattle, spreading beyond a few isolated herds.

Infectious disease doctor Nahid Bedelius says rural residents' contact with livestock and wild game make them more vulnerable to the potentially fatal disease.

At baseline, our rural communities may not have the same kind of health care resilience.

So if you have more than a couple of cases, we want to ensure that we can quickly make testing available to poultry farmers and commercial dairy farmers.

Meanwhile, rural health care and supplies of personal protective gear have eroded.

Nearly 200 rural hospitals have closed in the last 20 years, forcing folks to travel long distances for care.

You might think natural disasters like wildfires would cause people to move away.

Alana Newman reports a Daily Yonder analysis found some people are moving to those areas.

Daily Yonder data reporter Sarah Mallott found rural counties at risk from wildfires are actually gaining population.

Rural counties with a high wildfire risk gained about 2.5 percent of their total 2020 population in net migration between 2020 and 2023.

Though Western states are most vulnerable to the fires, Mallott says even with the risk, rural counties gained around 24,000 newcomers, but it didn't happen in cities.

The same trend is not happening at the same scale in metropolitan counties that have a really high risk for wildfire.

I'm Alana Newman.

Infrastructure traditionally means roads and bridges, but in rural Appalachia, broadband is often the road to education, healthcare, and opportunity.

Gail Manchin with the Appalachian Regional Commission says the need became clear when the pandemic showed how few families were ready for kids to learn at home.

They had no internet.

Parents could not go home and work.

And so that has become, obviously, the second highway system that we are building.

Since 1965, Manchin says 2/3 of federal infrastructure funding went to distressed rural areas, which has reduced poverty rates in dozens of rural counties.

She says Brookings Institution research found federal collaboration is key to rural infrastructure.

They can help be a bridge to these communities sharing their knowledge and their funding.

The Trump administration says it plans to take back money from President Biden's infrastructure projects.

People working on broadband in states like Alabama are watching closely.

For the "Daily Yonder" and Public News Service, I'm Roz Brown.

For more rural stories, visit dailyyonder.com.