In the morning I’ll stand in front of a room of Latin American growers, processors, and auditors at the Congreso Latam de Inocuidad Alimentaria in Puerto Vallarta and say something that ought to be Washington’s job to say: the United States has stopped counting the sick honestly and stopped holding anyone accountable when the counting stops. When the public system goes quiet, the private system — the people in that room, the ones who control the irrigation water and the fields — becomes the firewall.
And I’m not the only one saying it this month. Two people I respect, from opposite ends of the food-safety world, just published the same warning about the Cyclospora outbreak tearing through the US right now.
Thomas Gremillion runs food policy at the Consumer Federation of America and comes at it as a consumer advocate — he even gave the moment a name I’m going to borrow, MANHEDA: Make America Not Have Explosive Diarrhea Again. Frank Yiannas comes at it from the opposite corner. He ran food safety at Disney and then Walmart before he became the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy and Response — about as far inside the industry, and then inside the government, as a résumé gets. When the consumer watchdog and the former FDA food chief wave at the same fire from opposite ends of the room, the people who can put it out should look.
Start with a number. Or rather, start with the fact that nobody has one. Pull the states’ own tallies together and eleven of them are already past 4,900 cases. Michigan alone — because it actually went looking — is up to 3,309, nearly double the CDC’s entire confirmed national total. And the CDC? Its official count has crept from 145 to 843 to 1,645 across 34 states, even while the agency quietly concedes the true figure is closer to 7,000. A count that keeps climbing and never catches up isn’t reassuring. It’s an admission that we stopped looking.
Cyclospora makes the counting hard. Symptoms don’t appear for a week after the contaminated bite and can hide for two, so investigators are asking sick people to reconstruct meals from nine days back — and the culprit is usually a “stealth ingredient,” a garnish of cilantro or a handful of greens folded into a dozen dishes nobody remembers ordering. Unlike E. coli O157:H7 or Salmonella, the parasite doesn’t grow well in a lab, so the whole-genome sequencing that cracked the Boar’s Head Listeria outbreak barely helps here.
It takes shoe-leather epidemiology — interviews, shopper cards, case-control studies. Michigan did the shoe-leather: from more than a thousand interviews it pointed at lettuce and bagged salad greens, and Ohio pointed the same way. The states named the food. The CDC still calls it “clusters.”
That silence is Gremillion’s target, and he’s blunt about why it happened. Since January 2025 the CDC’s workforce has shrunk by more than a quarter; the clawback of $11.4 billion in grants triggered health-department layoffs across the country; and roughly 80% of the CDC’s domestic money flows to state and local partners, so cutting Atlanta means firing the epidemiologist in Lansing who’d otherwise be knocking on doors. The current budget proposes cutting the agency’s discretionary funding another 40%. And on July 1, 2025, the CDC quietly told FoodNet — the thirty-year backbone of U.S. foodborne surveillance — that its sites no longer had to report six of the eight pathogens it was built to track. Cyclospora was one of the six. Stop requiring the count and you get to say you can’t see the sick. That’s not a lag. It’s a policy.
Yiannas doesn’t throw those punches — he credits the state and local people and keeps his eyes on the fix. His argument is that we’ve treated Cyclospora like hurricane season, an unavoidable summer visitor, when we should treat it as a preventable problem: stronger seasonally-aware sourcing, better agricultural water, tighter controls early in the produce chain — the field, not the shopper’s sink. And he revives an idea that deserves its own line: a National Foodborne Outbreak Investigation Board, modeled on the NTSB, to coordinate investigations, force transparency, and actually bank the lessons after a major outbreak instead of losing them. The man who ran food safety for Disney, Walmart, and the FDA is telling you the federal coordination isn’t there.
Here’s what strikes me after a career spent representing the people on the wrong end of these outbreaks — the children with failing kidneys, the families burying a grandparent over a salad. When a consumer advocate and a former FDA commissioner, standing in opposite corners, land on the same diagnosis — we can’t count, we can’t trace, we can’t coordinate — that isn’t a partisan talking point. It’s a system failing in daylight. Every one of these outbreaks gets dressed up as bad luck; almost none of it is. And when the public count and the public consequence both go quiet, the only firewall left is the room I’m walking into in the morning — its water, its suppliers, its willingness to name a food fast and pull it on a hunch.
I’ve said for years that I’d happily be put out of business by a food supply that stopped poisoning people, and the room in Puerto Vallarta is one of the few that can actually do it. Gremillion asks whether Cyclospora will finally spur a MANHEDA movement; with Yiannas saying a version of the same thing from the other end of the spectrum, maybe this is the summer it does. The alternative is more outbreaks we can feel but can’t count — and more clients in my office.
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