(The Epoch Times)—Federal food safety inspectors have begun testing ground beef from grocery stores for the presence of bird flu in states where dairy cows have tested positive for the virus, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
A USDA spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that the agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is carrying out three separate beef safety studies, including one that involves sampling ground beef from grocery stores in the nine states where dairy cattle have tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu.
“Samples are being collected at retail outlets in the states in which dairy cow herds have tested positive for H5N1 influenza virus,” the spokesperson said, adding that the ground beef samples will be analyzed using polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which can detect whether any viral particles are present.
The second study involves testing beef muscle from dairy cows that were condemned at selected slaughterhouses for the presence of bird flu.
“For the second sampling effort, FSIS is currently collecting muscle samples at FSIS-inspected slaughter facilities of cull dairy cattle that have been condemned for systemic pathologies,” the spokesperson clarified.
The third study is a ground beef cooking study, which involves using a “virus surrogate” in ground beef and cooking it at different temperatures to “determine log-reduction” of the H5N1 virus, the spokesperson said.
Earlier, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said that the application of heat in a process known as pasteurization killed the bird flu virus in milk. That came after regulators found that roughly 20 percent of retail milk samples tested positive for bird flu.
So far, no beef cattle have tested positive for the H5N1 virus. Last week, the USDA said it found bird flu in a lung tissue sample from an asymptomatic dairy cow that was sent to slaughter from an infected herd. The agency said that the animal did not enter the food supply.
The USDA spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the results of the three beef safety studies are forthcoming and would be released to the public. He added that the USDA has a “rigorous” meat inspection process and the agency “is confident that the meat supply is safe.”
“While we have multiple safeguards in place to protect consumers, we recommend consumers properly handle raw meats and cook to a safe internal temperature,” the spokesperson said. “Cooking to a safe internal temperature kills bacteria and viruses in meat.”
Sarah Little, a spokesperson for the Meat Institute, an industry group representing meat processors, told Reuters that the USDA’s additional screening “is appropriate to ensure public health is protected and to stop the spread of animal disease.”
Dairy Cow Testing
The USDA and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) have begun requiring lactating dairy cows to test negative for bird flu before being moved across state lines in a bid to stem the spread of the virus.
The federal order, which was first announced on April 24, took effect on April 29.
The agency issued an update to the requirement on April 27, clarifying that testing would not be required for cows that are shipped over state lines directly to slaughter facilities from barns where they are sold. Such cows only need documentation showing they were inspected by a veterinarian.
Positive flu tests will prohibit cows from being moved for 30 days and until they test negative, USDA officials said in a more detailed “requirements and recommendations” document.
Owners of herds containing cows that test positive are encouraged to work with local and state health agencies, including by allowing public health officials to access on-farm activities.
Farm workers who are exposed to bird flu-infected cattle should be monitored daily for signs and symptoms of acute respiratory illness.
“While it is still unclear exactly how virus is spreading, the virus is shed in milk at high concentrations; therefore, anything that comes in contact with unpasteurized raw milk, spilled milk, etc. may spread the virus including other animals, vehicles, and other objects or materials,” the USDA cautioned in the guidance document. “Therefore, both dairy and poultry producers should redouble biosecurity efforts and be vigilant about monitoring for and controlling disease in their herds and flocks.”
To date, Colombia is the only country that has restricted the import of beef and beef products coming from U.S. states where dairy cows have tested positive for bird flu.
The only known human infection in the current outbreak was in a Texas farm worker who suffered conjunctivitis at the end of March following exposure to presumably infected dairy cattle, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“The patient reported conjunctivitis with no other symptoms, was not hospitalized, and is recovering,” the CDC said. “The patient was recommended to isolate and received antiviral treatment with oseltamivir.”
The Texas farm worker is only the second case ever of the H5N1 virus to be detected in humans.
The first case was reported in 2022 in Colorado, in a person who came into contact with poultry presumably infected with the virus.
“The current risk these viruses pose to the public remains low,” the CDC says.
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.
When you “vaccinate” cows with the bird flu, they are going to contract the bird flu. No-brainer.
Let’s give the cows two weeks to slow the spread…
Who’s vaccinating cows with “bird flu?”
Answer: no one.