Twenty-Eight States Received the Taylor Farms Lettuce. Nine Are in the Taco Bell Cyclospora Outbreak. How many are Linked to Taylor Farms Lettuce? Other Exposures?

Nothing moved over the weekend. The CDC outbreak count still stands at 1,947 people in nine states, 98 hospitalized, no deaths, with illness onsets running June 22 through July 20 — the figure posted Friday after the Washington Post had the four new states first. The surveillance page is a different number measuring a different thing: 4,173 laboratory-confirmed domestically acquired cases across 41 states, 308 hospitalized, with at least 7,400 more reported by states and not yet confirmed, data current through July 21.

That 4,173 is a domestic number by construction. CDC counts a case as domestically acquired only when the patient reports no international travel in the fourteen days before onset, a definition it spelled out in its July health advisory. There is a separate travel-associated cohort — 767 cases with 33 hospitalizations across 41 states — which almost never appears in the coverage. Add the two and CDC’s 2026 laboratory-confirmed total is closer to 4,940.

The states are far less consistent. Of the fifty, only twelve say anything at all about where their cases were acquired, and only nine put numbers to it: Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. California states it in the negative — no locally acquired cases identified. Maryland and Pennsylvania describe their cases as travel-related without publishing a count. The other thirty-eight publish a total and nothing else, so for roughly three quarters of the country there is no public answer to the question of whether the parasite was picked up in a Guanajuato field, a Michigan Taco Bell, or a vacation.

Washington publishes the most complete breakdown in the country and it is worth reading closely. Thirty-eight cases since May 1, one hospitalized, thirty-six interviewed. Twenty-seven of the thirty-six traveled internationally, twenty-four of those to Mexico. Nine were domestic — and four of those nine fell ill after traveling to Michigan. Washington is not one of the nine outbreak states, and four of its residents caught this in one.

Elsewhere the splits cut both ways. Texas reports all 68 of its cases as domestically acquired. Illinois had 215 domestic against 145 international at the 408-case mark. Virginia runs 38 domestic, 27 abroad, 14 unknown. Colorado, by contrast, found only 8 domestic among the 120 cases it had exposure information for, and Wisconsin only 11 of 61. Kansas was at 37 of 55 when it last published the breakdown — before its count more than quintupled to 289.

The recall is a third map again. FDA’s investigation page splits the distribution into two channels. Foodservice product went to twenty-seven states between June 29 and July 16. Marketside-brand iceberg salad and shredded lettuce went to Walmart stores in fifteen. Fourteen states are on both lists. Thirteen received it only through foodservice distributors — including Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania, so the two hardest-hit states in the country got this lettuce through a distributor and never off a shelf. West Virginia is the reverse and the only one of its kind: retail only, and it was not on the distribution list at all until FDA added it on July 24, a week after the recall and while it was already one of the five original outbreak states. Consumer Reports made the foodservice point first.

Combined, the recall footprint is twenty-eight states. All nine outbreak states are on it. Nineteen more received the product and are not in the outbreak; they report roughly 1,400 cases with no confirmed link to it, and three of them — Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina — received the lettuce and publish no case count at all. That leaves twenty-two states that received none of this product. They report about 1,020 cases between them, and New York alone is 666 of that.

The recall reached twenty-eight states, the outbreak is defined as nine, and the states report just over 15,500 sick. Below is where each one stands, what it says about domestic versus foreign acquisition, whether it received the recalled lettuce, and whether it is in the Taco Bell cluster.

A word on the counts. Where a state publishes its own figure I used it, because state health departments are closer to the illnesses and update more often. Update cadence is uneven — Michigan and Indiana post on weekdays, West Virginia Tuesdays and Fridays, Virginia Mondays, Ohio and Kentucky weekly, CDC weekly — so any national total blends numbers of different ages. Ohio has still not posted its own statewide figure; the 2,574 and 2,596 come from CNN and NBC respectively. Fifteen states publish no 2026 count at all. The distribution column follows FDA’s own two lists, and FDA’s page still carries the line that distribution is confirmed only for the states named and that product may have reached others. The blank cells in the middle column are not zeroes. They are silences.