The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week issued a health advisory warning doctors and health authorities about a recent increase in invasive group A streptococcus bacterial infections among children.
In a warning about a rise of invasive group A streptococcal—or iGAS—infections, the CDC issued a “Health Alert Network Health Advisory” to alert clinicians and public health authorities in a news release on Dec. 22. Health officials say that invasive streptococcal A infection is a severe and sometimes life-threatening infection in which the streptococcus bacterial invades the blood, fat tissue, lungs, or deep muscle.
“In November 2022, CDC was notified of a possible increase in iGAS infections among children at a hospital in Colorado,” the release said. “Potential increases in pediatric iGAS cases in other states were subsequently noted by contributors to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.”
And the “increased number of pediatric iGAS cases in some jurisdictions has occurred in the setting of increased circulation of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, and other respiratory viruses,” said the CDC.
The health agency noted that the overall number of invasive strep cases has been “relatively low” and that such infections are “rare” among children. Nonetheless, the CDC said it is investigating.
Invasive group A streptococcal infections, the CDC says, “can cause a range of illnesses, from pharyngitis (i.e., strep throat) and skin and soft tissue infections to uncommon but severe diseases such as sepsis, streptococcal toxic shock syndrome and necrotizing fasciitis.” It is also “associated with high mortality rates and require immediate treatment, including appropriate antibiotic therapy,” according to the CDC.
“Similar to other agents spread primarily by the respiratory route, cases of GAS, including both iGAS and streptococcal pharyngitis (strep throat), tend to have a pronounced seasonal pattern with a peak in December through April in the United States,” the alert said. “Strep throat is most common among school-aged children, and exposure to someone with strep throat is a risk factor for iGAS infection.”
“In addition, increased rates of iGAS infection have been noted during times of increased influenza activity. Seasonal influenza activity is currently high in the U.S. and above the levels seen in recent years,” it added.
Two children recently died in Colorado after they were reported to have invasive group A strep, officials said in mid-December. Colorado state officials later announced that 11 children in the Denver metro area had been reported to have been infected with invasive group A strep since Nov. 1.
According to NBC News and ABC News, several children’s hospitals in Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and Washington have also recently reported higher-than-average numbers of invasive group A strep infections this season compared to past years.
“While they remain rare, [Colorado’s health agency] is seeing invasive group A strep infections in Colorado that cause severe illness,” Colorado state epidemiologist Rachel Herlihy said in a Dec. 15 statement, adding: “Stay home when you are sick and practice good hand hygiene—regularly wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds or use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60 percent alcohol and avoid touching your face. Call your child’s doctor if they are experiencing new or worsening symptoms of an illness.”
Symptoms
Officials say early signs and symptoms of normal strep A include flu-like symptoms such as a fever, swollen glands, aching body, sore throat, strep throat, tonsillitis, a rash that feels rough like sandpaper as well as scabs and sores, pain and swelling known as cellulitis, muscle aches, nausea, and vomiting.
“Most strep A infections are not serious and can be treated with antibiotics,” the UK’s National Health Service says on its website, adding that when the infection worsens, that’s when it is known as invasive group A strep.
Other health agencies say that if the child or individual shows signs of septicemia, or blood poisoning, during a bout of invasive group A strep symptoms include fever, chills, headache, generally not feeling well, pale skin, lack of energy, rapid breathing, and an increased heart rate.
“Early symptoms of necrotizing fasciitis include severe pain and swelling, often rapidly getting worse; fever; redness around a wound,” the B.C. Centre for Disease Control says. “Early symptoms of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome include fever; sudden severe pain, often in an arm or leg; dizziness; confusion; feelings of having “the flu”; and a flat red rash over large areas of the body.”
Mimi Ngyen-Ly contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
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.
