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The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that, over the weekend, it accidentally fired "several" agency employees who are working on the federal government's response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak. The agency said it is now trying to quickly reverse the firings. (Smith, Zanona and Strickler, 2/18)

The nation’s top public health agency is losing most of the scientists in a prestigious, but lesser-known, laboratory program that has become a mainstay of outbreak responses. The fellowship program was hit hard during the layoffs coming to many federal departments. ... The program had been created about 10 years ago to help the CDC remedy embarrassing lab-safety failures. The cuts may not have an immediate impact, but they likely will haunt the nation in the months to come, said Stephan Monroe, a former CDC official who oversaw the reform of the agency’s lab services. (Stobbe, 2/19)

With egg prices soaring, the Trump administration is planning a new strategy for fighting bird flu that stresses vaccinations and tighter biosecurity instead of killing off millions of chickens when the disease strikes a flock. The federal government will seek “better ways, with biosecurity and medication and so on” rather than the current standard practice of destroying all the birds on a farm when an infection is detected, Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” (Karnowski, 2/18)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave conditional approval for an updated bird flu vaccine to protect poultry against the H5N1 strain that's stricken more than 150 million birds in commercial and backyard flocks. Why it matters: None of the current vaccines completely match the deadly strain driving the current outbreak, and officials are working to rebuild a national stockpile for use in livestock. (Bettelheim, 2/18)

China has reported two more human infections involving H9N2 avian flu, and, unlike most earlier patients, the latest are adults, according to a weekly avian flu update from the Hong Kong Centre for Health Protection. The developments follow two H9N2 reports from China last week, involving a child and a teen who were from Hunan province. (Schnirring, 2/18)