FDA Has Seventeen Open Outbreak Investigations, 7,324 Sick and Three Dead. USDA Lists Three for All of 2026 and Marks Every One of Them Closed.

Two federal pages carry the running account of what is making Americans sick right now. One is FDA’s Investigations of Foodborne Illness Outbreaks table. The other is USDA’s Outbreak Investigations: Response table at the Food Safety and Inspection Service. Neither requires a Freedom of Information Act request. Both are updated on a schedule. Read them side by side on a Wednesday in August and you get a picture that neither agency has put into a press release.

FDA’s table carries seventeen investigations in its Active section. Run down each file and add the case counts the agency publishes on the individual advisories, and the table describes 7,324 illnesses, 394 hospitalizations where a number is given, and three deaths — two from Cyclospora in Michigan and one from Listeria in the soft cheese outbreak. Eleven of the seventeen are ongoing. Six are files where FDA itself says the outbreak is over.

Here is the whole table as it stands today.

Ref. #	Pathogen	Food named	Cases	Outbreak	Inspected on site
1398	Cyclospora	Not yet identified	10	Ongoing
1392	Cyclospora	Not yet identified	115	Ongoing
1395	Salmonella Javiana	Jalapeño peppers	345	Ongoing
1379	Listeria monocytogenes	Not yet identified	9	Ongoing	Yes
1390	Cyclospora	Iceberg lettuce	6,358	Ongoing
1385	Cyclospora	Not yet identified	25	Ongoing
1384	Cyclospora	Not yet identified	18	Ended
1387	SalmonellaOranienburg	Not yet identified	93	Ongoing
1389	E. coli O145:H28	Frozen blueberries	12	Ongoing
1382	E. coli O157:H7	Not yet identified	14	Ended
1381	Cyclospora	Not yet identified	2	Ended
1383	Clostridium botulinum	Powdered infant formula	4	Ongoing	Yes
1378	SalmonellaEnteritidis	Shell eggs	98	Ongoing	Yes
1380	Listeria monocytogenes	Requesón / soft ricotta	12	Ongoing	Yes
1375	Cyclospora	Not yet identified	8	Ended
1366	Salmonella Newport	Cantaloupe	70	Ended	Yes
1358	SalmonellaTyphimurium et al.	Moringa leaf powder	131	Ended	Yes

Nine of the seventeen have no food named at all. That column reads Not Yet Identified, which is fair enough on a file opened last week, and the newest of these was posted August 5. The oldest was posted June 3, ten weeks ago. Those nine files hold 294 sick people who will most likely never be told what they ate.

Cyclospora accounts for seven of the seventeen and 6,536 of the 7,324 people on the table, which is eighty-nine percent of everything FDA is currently investigating. One of those seven is the Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce file at 6,358 illnesses, 278 hospitalizations and two deaths. The other six are 178 people scattered across files with no food named, opened between June 3 and August 5, that FDA is not publicly connecting to the lettuce or to each other.

The most useful column on the page is the one nobody quotes. Eleven of the seventeen show no on-site inspection initiated, and that includes the two biggest files on the table — the 6,358-case lettuce outbreak and the 345-case jalapeño outbreak. The six investigations that did get an inspection are, every one of them, a firm standing on American soil. The frozen blueberry file shows what has taken the place of an inspection when the firm is not: FDA ran a remote regulatory assessment of the Chilean supplier, collected records, and added the company to an import alert. A records review conducted over the internet is now what stands in for walking the ground.

Then there is the question of how old these pages actually are. Each advisory carries its own content-current stamp, and measured against today they run: soft cheese, June 29, forty-four days; infant formula, July 6, thirty-seven days; eggs, July 24, nineteen days; frozen blueberries, July 30, thirteen days; Cyclospora and iceberg lettuce, August 5, seven days; jalapeños, August 10, two days. The master table itself is stamped August 6.

The egg file is the one that should be keeping somebody at the agency awake. Midwest Poultry Services recalled shell eggswith sell-by or best-by dates running through August 17, 2026 — five days from today. The advisory that tells a consumer which carton codes to look for has not been touched in nineteen days. Ninety-eight people across seventeen states are sick, twenty-six of them hospitalized, and FDA says plainly on that page that Midwest Poultry does not account for all of the illnesses. Recalled eggs are still in refrigerators. The page telling people how to recognize them is three weeks old.

The soft cheese advisory has gone forty-four days without an update, and it is the file with the death. Twelve people infected across Illinois, Maryland, New York and Virginia, ten hospitalized, one dead, with specimen collection dates reaching back to March 2023. A multi-year Listeria outbreak that has already killed someone gets a page that has not been revised since June.

The word Active on that table also means considerably less than it appears to. Six of the seventeen rows say the outbreak has ended while the investigation is still carried as Active. The moringa leaf powder advisory states outright that CDC has declared the outbreak over and FDA’s investigation complete; the table still lists it as Active seven months after it opened. Reference 1366, the Salmonella Newport cantaloupe outbreak, was posted February 25, is marked ended, never received a public advisory at all, and is still sitting in the Active section in the middle of August.

The single strongest paragraph on any of these pages is FDA’s own writing, on the infant botulism advisory. The Nara Organics lots fed to the sick infants were made with milk supplied by Organic West Milk and spray dried by Dairy Farmers of America — the same two suppliers behind the ByHeart infant botulism outbreak in November 2025. FDA ran a traceforward during that 2025 investigation to find out who else Organic West Milk was supplying. Organic West Milk handed over a customer list that did not include the makers of Nara Organics formula, and has since told FDA that the list it provided was incomplete. Four more infants were hospitalized in the gap between the incomplete list and the correction. My firm represents families in both outbreaks, and I am telling you what the agency wrote, not what I think of it.

One more thing worth noticing before leaving FDA’s page. Taylor Farms appears on it twice. It is the supplier behind the iceberg lettuce outbreak, and on August 9 Taylor Fresh Foods also recalled pico de gallo, guacamole, salsa, dips and sandwiches made with the recalled Sinaloa jalapeños, sold at Hannaford, Kroger, Stop and Shop, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart and Whole Foods across twenty-six states, with best-if-used-by dates running to August 16. Two of the largest open investigations in the country run through the same company.

Now turn to the other page. FSIS says it updates its outbreak table at least weekly, and it has kept that promise — the page is stamped today. For all of 2026 it lists three investigations. The Active column says No on every one of them.

Reference	Pathogen	Product	Active
2026-01 (May)	Listeria monocytogenes	Retail-sliced headcheese	No
2026-02 (May)	E. coli O157:H7	Beef kofta	No
2026-03 (June)	Salmonella Enteritidis	Chicken (suspect)	No

Reference 2026-01 is the retail-sliced headcheese outbreak, which drew an FSIS public health alert and an advisory from Illinois. Reference 2026-02 is the beef kofta outbreak at The Kebab Shop, where FSIS collected raw kofta that tested positive for E. coli O157:H7 and California warned the public about nine confirmed illnesses, six of them in children, five hospitalizations and two children with hemolytic uremic syndrome. My firm represents clients in that outbreak. Reference 2026-03 is a Salmonella Enteritidis cluster at the Broome County Correctional Facility in New York, product listed as chicken, suspect. All three are marked closed.

Three outbreak investigations for a country of 340 million people, in a year that is two-thirds gone, and not one of them open. FSIS is entitled to its explanation, and the explanation is on the page: the agency posts an investigation only where there is compelling evidence that a meat, poultry or egg product is the source, and outbreaks that turn out to involve an FDA-regulated food come off its list. That is a real limit and it deserves to be stated. It is not the whole answer. Zero active meat and poultry outbreak investigations in mid-August is not a description of the American food supply. It is a description of what gets posted.

The gap shows up plainly in the jalapeño outbreak. On August 8, FSIS issued a public health alert for meat and poultry products containing the recalled Sinaloa jalapeños, with a product list long enough to require its own PDF. That alert is the banner running across the top of the FSIS website right now. It does not appear anywhere on the FSIS outbreak table, because the contaminated ingredient is regulated by FDA. A consumer who goes to USDA’s outbreak page to find out whether meat and poultry are involved in anything this month leaves with three closed files and no idea.

Seventeen open investigations at one agency and none at the other. Nine files with no food named, carrying 294 people. Eleven with no inspection, including the two biggest. Six carried as Active with the outbreak already over. One advisory that has not been revised since June sitting on the only file with a death, and another that has not been revised in nineteen days while the recalled eggs it describes are still good for another five. Both pages are public. Anyone can read them. Almost nobody does.