A mystery illness that’s impacted dairy herds in the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico and Kansas now has a diagnosis: Influenza A. USDA says genetic sequencing revealed it’s the same strain of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) that’s been in the U.S. for two years.

APHIS says the “National Veterinary Services Laboratories” detected Influenza “A” in samples from several impacted herds in Texas, Kansas and New Mexico. The virus is carried by wild waterfowl, which experts think is how the illness is spreading.

The experts did not think that bird flu would be a threat to dairy cattle.

Unfortunately, the experts were wrong.

Scientists were able to confirm the presence of the bird flu by testing samples of milk from sick cows…

According to USDA, as of March 25, unpasteurized, clinical samples of milk from sick cattle collected from two dairy farms in Kansas and one in Texas, as well as an oropharyngeal swab from another dairy in Texas, have tested positive for the virus.

Now that bird flu has been identified as the culprit, dairy farmers are being urged to strictly implement “all standard biosecurity measures”…

Officials are strongly advising dairy producers to use all standard biosecurity measures. They note it’s important for producers to clean and disinfect all livestock watering devices and isolate drinking water where it might be contaminated by waterfowl. Farmers are also being asked to notify their herd veterinarian if they suspect any cattle within their herd are displaying symptoms of this condition.

I was quite shocked to learn that this was happening right here in our own country.

The good news is that all milk from sick cows is being kept out of the food chain…

“Also, routine testing and well-established protocols for U.S. dairy will continue to ensure that only safe milk enters the food supply. In keeping with the federal Grade ‘A’ Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO), milk from sick cows must be collected separately and is not allowed to enter the food supply chain. This means affected dairy cows are segregated, as is normal practice with any animal health concern, and their milk does not enter the food supply. Consumers in the United States and around the world can remain confident in the safety and quality of U.S. dairy,” the statement said.

Will we eventually get to a point where entire herds of dairy cows have to be killed in order to prevent the spread of the disease? Let’s hope not.

Earlier this month, we learned that a goat in Minnesota has also tested positive for bird flu…

A goat in Stevens County, Minnesota, has tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), becoming the first U.S. detection of HPAI in a domestic ruminant. The goat contracted the virus after a poultry flock on the same premises was depopulated in February due to the virus. Following the confirmation of HPAI in the goat, the Minnesota Board of Animal Health quarantined all other species on the premises. The Board said is working with USDA to investigate the transmission of the virus in this case.

It appears to be just a matter of time before the bird flu starts becoming a significant threat to humans as well.

According to Dr. Chris Walzer, “dozens of mammalian species” have already been infected…

In January, Dr Chris Walzer, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Executive Director of Health, in a statement, said: “It (H5N1) has infected over 150 wild and domestic avian species around the globe as well as dozens of mammalian species. The bird flu outbreak is the worst globally and also in US history, with hundreds-of-millions of birds dead since it first turned up in domestic waterfowl in China in 1996.”

We better hope that the bird flu does not mutate into a form that can spread very easily among humans.

Because according to the NIH, bird flu can have a death rate of more than 50 percent in humans…

As of November 2022, 240 cases of human avian influenza A (H5N1) virus have been confirmed from the Western Pacific Region since 2003 with a case fatality rate of 56%.

A global bird flu crisis would be far worse than anything that we have experienced during the past several years.

Just try to imagine the panic that would ensue if H5N1 were to start killing millions of people around the world.

Hopefully that will not happen any time soon.

Earlier today, I did come across an article about a 21-year-old student in Vietnam that was just killed by H5N1…

A student in Vietnam has died of H5N1 bird flu, according to the country’s Department of Preventive Medicine.

The 21-year-old man developed symptoms of fever and a cough on March 11. A week later, he presented at Ninh Hoa Medical Center in Vietnam’s eastern Khanh Hoa province, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia and transferred to Khanh Hoa General Hospital.

The student tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza on March 20, and further tests conducted two days later at the Nha Trang Pasteur Institute showed the patient was infected with the H5N1 subtype.

Let us pray that this was just an isolated incident.

Meanwhile, other pestilences continue to spread all over the planet.

For example, dengue fever has become a major problem in Brazil, and now government officials in Puerto Rico have declared a dengue fever epidemic…

On Monday, government leaders in Puerto Rico declared a dengue epidemic after a spike in cases of the mosquito-borne disease hit the island.

From the start of the year through March 10, there were 549 cases, including 341 hospitalizations and 29 severe cases, according to the most recent data provide by the Puerto Rico Department of Health. Cases are concentrated in cities including San Juan, Bayamon, Guaynabo and Carolina.

I have been repeatedly warning my readers that global pestilences would be one of the major themes of the next several years.

Bird flu has already killed hundreds of millions of birds, and now it is spreading in mammals.

A widespread bird flu outbreak among humans would have the potential to be absolutely catastrophic, and so we will want to watch this story very, very closely.

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.

Kansas has been called the country’s breadbasket. Now, wheat farmers in the state will reap their smallest harvest in more than 60 years.

This will go directly down the chain, from farmers to consumers at the grocery store.

Kansas normally produces more wheat than any other U.S. state by a wide margin.

But now the harvest in that state will be the smallest that we have seen since 1957…

For the last two years, a drought has withered a lot of the crop.

Now, this year’s wheat harvest in Kansas is shaping up to be the smallest since 1957. That year, the Eisenhower administration intentionally suppressed wheat production.

There were 166 million people living in the United States in 1957.

Today, there are 331 million people.

So who is going to volunteer to give up eating wheat this year so that others can consume what they normally do?

At this point, things are so bad that we are being told that flour mills in Kansas “will likely have to buy wheat grown in eastern Europe”…

Kansas flour mills will likely have to buy wheat grown in eastern Europe.

For decades, Kansas has led the nation in wheat production. The U.S. leads the world in in wheat exports, as well.

This is a major problem.

But can’t we all just eat more corn instead?

After all, corn is already in thousands upon thousands of different products that Americans consume on a regular basis.

Well, it turns out that corn production is being greatly affected by drought as well.  The following comes from a Newsweek article entitled “Corn Prices Set to Soar After Midwest Hit by Worst Drought in 30 Years”…

An unusually dry May in the Midwest has raised concerns over this year’s corn crop in the Corn Belt, the region stretching from the panhandle of Texas up to North Dakota and east to Ohio which dominates the country’s corn production.

For a long time I have been warning that Dust Bowl conditions would return to the middle of the country, and now we are here.

Extremely dry conditions are being accompanied by unusually hot temperatures, and this combination is causing all sorts of havoc for corn farmers…

The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service recently reported increasingly dry topsoil, poor pasture conditions in Missouri, and limited moisture for newly planted crops.

“We have very high temperatures all the way up through the northern plains of the Midwest, which impacts more than just corn and soybeans—it’s impacting other crops as well,” Curt Covington, senior director of partner relations at AgAmerica, America’s largest nonbank agricultural lender, told Newsweek.

We desperately need rain, and lots of it.

More than a third of all U.S. corn production is in areas that are currently experiencing drought, and the situation is especially dire in the “Corn Belt” states…

According to the US Drought Monitor, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin, often called the “Corn Belt” states, are experiencing “exceptional drought” to “moderate drought.” The timing of the drought, this early in the season, could stress young plants.

Normally, if there is going to be serious drought in the middle of the country we see it later in the year.

So the fact that there is this much drought this early in 2023 is a really bad sign.

Of course it isn’t just wheat and corn farmers that are suffering…

• The size of the U.S. beef cow herd is “the smallest since 1962”.
• The orange harvest in Florida will be approximately 56 percent smaller than last year.
• Thanks to extremely bizarre weather, approximately 90 percent of Georgia’s peach crop for 2023 has been destroyed.

Most Americans don’t realize that things have gotten so bad.

If you do not know how to grow a garden, you might want to learn.

Food prices are already painfully high, and they are only going to go higher.

And this is all happening in the context of the worst global food crisis in modern history.

Hunger has been spreading around the world like wildfire, and Yahoo News is reporting that last year there was “a 33% spike in the number of people facing hunger globally”…

The 2023 Global Report on Food Crises, which published its findings last month, found that last year saw a 33% spike in the number of people facing hunger globally from the previous year, up from 193 million people in 53 countries and territories in 2021. It was also the fourth consecutive year that an increasing number of people experienced Phase 3, or above, food insecurity, which designates their situation as serious, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a tool for improving food security analysis and decision making.

Sadly, this is just the beginning. Due to multiple long-term trends which I discuss in my latest book, global famine has become inevitable.

No matter what decisions our leaders make now, they aren’t going to be able to keep global food production from collapsing in the years ahead.

They know this, but they don’t want everyone to freak out. I would greatly encourage everyone to start becoming less dependent on the system and more self-sufficient.

Global food supplies are going to keep getting tighter and tighter, and once we get to a real crisis point you will want to be able to take care of yourself, your family and those that will be depending on you.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.