(End of the American Dream)—What they are telling us about the bird flu just keeps changing. At first, they told us that humans were at no risk. But now the WHO says that there is “enormous concern” that H5N1 could potentially start spreading among humans. And when dairy cows in the U.S. started catching bird flu, we were assured that milk from infected cows was being kept out of the supply chain. So most Americans continued to buy milk, cheese and butter as usual. But now two different rounds of testing have confirmed that massive amounts of milk from infected dairy cows is getting into the supply chain. In fact, on Thursday an update that was posted on the official FDA website openly admitted that approximately one out of every five samples of grocery store milk that they tested had “viral fragments” in them…
Today, the FDA received some initial results from its nationally representative commercial milk sampling study. The agency continues to analyze this information; however, the initial results show about 1 in 5 of the retail samples tested are quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)-positive for HPAI viral fragments, with a greater proportion of positive results coming from milk in areas with infected herds.
That is a bombshell.
But they are not the only ones that have been doing such testing.
A veterinary epidemiologist at Ohio State University tested “150 commercial milk products from around the Midwest”, and he found viral material in more than a third of them…
Andrew Bowman, a veterinary epidemiologist at Ohio State University, had a hunch. He had been struck by the huge amounts of H5N1 virus he’d seen in milk from cows infected with the bird flu and thought that at least some virus was getting off of farms and going downstream — onto store shelves.
He knew the Food and Drug Administration was working on its own national survey of the milk supply. But he was impatient. So he and a graduate student went on a road trip: They collected 150 commercial milk products from around the Midwest, representing dairy processing plants in 10 different states, including some where herds have tested positive for H5N1. Genetic testing found viral RNA in 58 samples, he told STAT.
What these tests indicate is that H5N1 is far, far more widespread in dairy cows than we had been told.
Originally, I wasn’t too concerned when I heard that there were a few dozen confirmed cases in herds across the country, because that was just a very small fraction of the total.
But now experts are acknowledging that these latest tests clearly show that a very large proportion of U.S. dairy cows have been exposed to the virus…
“The fact that you can go into a supermarket and 30% to 40% of those samples test positive, that suggests there’s more of the virus around than is currently being recognized,” said Richard Webby, an influenza virologist who has been analyzing the samples at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., where he heads the WHO Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals.
The good news is that the FDA is reporting that “preliminary results” indicate that the pasteurization process kills off the bird flu that has been getting into our milk supply…
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Preliminary results of tests run by the Food and Drug Administration show that pasteurization is working to kill off bird flu in milk, the agency said Friday.
“This additional testing did not detect any live, infectious virus. These results reaffirm our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the FDA said in a statement.
Hopefully those “preliminary results” will be confirmed.
Unfortunately, any milk that has not been pasteurized is at risk.
In fact, the USDA is telling us that deaths and neurological disease have been “widely reported” among cats that had been drinking unpasteurized milk from dairy cows…
Other animals have also not fared as well during the outbreak: the USDA said Friday that deaths and neurological disease had been “widely reported” in cats around dairy farms. Officials have said they suspect cats had been drinking leftover raw milk from infected cows.
Why are we only hearing about this now?
And what else are they not telling us?
It appears that we have a major crisis on our hands.
Sadly, more confirmed cases just keep rolling in. At this point, Colorado has become the ninth state where dairy cows have officially tested positive…
Avian influenza has been confirmed in dairy cows in Colorado, making the Centennial State the ninth in the U.S. to see the highly contagious virus jump from bird to cattle.
According to the state Department of Agriculture, the Colorado State Veterinarian Office was alerted on April 22 that a dairy herd in northeastern Colorado was exhibiting symptoms of H5N1, or the bird flu. In cattle, bird flu symptoms include decreased feed intake, decreased milk production, and abnormal milk when it is produced.
“Samples submitted to the Colorado State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory tested presumptive positive for HPAI on April 24 and were confirmed by the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] National Veterinary Services Laboratory on April 25,” the Colorado Department of Agriculture said.
Many scientists are deeply concerned about the possibility that H5N1 could jump from dairy cows to dairy workers.
So far, just one dairy worker in Texas has officially tested positive, but there may be a lot more cases out there. The following comes from an NBC News article entitled “Bird flu cases are likely being missed in dairy workers, experts say”…
During that same time, she said, dairy workers — including those who were never in close contact with the sick cows — also fell ill.
“People had some classic flu-like symptoms, including high fever, sweating at night, chills, lower back pain,” as well as upset stomach, vomiting and diarrhea, Petersen said. “They also tended to have “pretty severe conjunctivitis and swelling of their eyelids.”
Petersen noted that the people were never tested for H5N1; it’s possible that their symptoms were the result of another illness.
If H5N1 mutates into a form that spreads easily from human to human, that would be a nightmare.
According to the official WHO website, more than 50 percent of all confirmed cases in humans since 2003 have resulted in death…
From 2003 to 1 April 2024, a total of 889 cases and 463 deaths (CFR 52%) caused by influenza A(H5N1) virus have been reported worldwide from 23 countries.
In my most recent book entitled “Chaos”, I warned that pestilences would be one of the major themes that we would be dealing with in 2024.
The bird flu has already killed millions upon millions of birds all over the globe, and now it has made the jump into mammals such as dairy cows and cats.
Many experts are convinced that it is just a matter of time before is starts spreading among humans on a widespread basis, and once that happens everything will change.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.