FDA Now Carries Nineteen Open Foodborne Illness Investigations, 12,201 People Sick, 595 Hospitalized and Three Dead. A New Salmonella Newport Outbreak Was Posted Today With 84 People Already In It and No Food Named. The Alfalfa Sprout Recall FDA Asked For Finally Issued on August 22.

FDA updated its Investigations of Foodborne Illness Outbreaks table today, August 26, 2026, and the Active section now runs to nineteen files. Add up the case counts the agency publishes on each one and the table describes 12,201 illnesses, 595 hospitalizations where a number is given, and three deaths, two from Cyclospora in Michigan and one from Listeria in a Maryland soft cheese. Two weeks ago the same table carried seventeen files and 7,324 illnesses. Three things moved today that a consumer can act on: a brand new Salmonella Newport outbreak arrived with 84 people already counted and no food named, the alfalfa sprout recall FDA had been asking for finally issued on August 22, and the Listeria outbreak that killed someone was declared over.

A new Salmonella Newport file arrived today carrying 84 people and no food name

Reference number 1403 was posted August 26 with a case count of 84 and the product column reading Not Yet Identified. FDA has opened a traceback. It has not opened an on-site inspection and it has not started sampling. There is no advisory, so there is no page telling anyone what to avoid, and the only public advice attached to the row is a link to general safe food handling.

Eighty-four people is not a small file. It is larger than the egg outbreak, larger than the sprout outbreak, and larger than every Cyclospora file on the table except the lettuce one. A number that size does not accumulate in a day. It accumulates over weeks in state laboratories and then surfaces at CDC when the sequences are matched, which means the illnesses in this outbreak mostly happened before today and the food that caused them is probably still being sold. Nobody can be told to check anything, because nobody has said what to check.

Nineteen open investigations describe 12,201 illnesses, 595 hospitalizations and three deaths

Here is the whole Active section, with the case counts pulled from each individual advisory rather than from the summary row, and with the date each page was last touched. Seven of the nineteen are Cyclospora files, and between them they carry 11,211 people, which is 92 percent of everything on the table. The iceberg lettuce outbreak alone accounts for 10,930 of them.

Ref #	Pathogen	Product named	Cases	Hosp	Deaths	Page last touched
1403	Salmonella Newport	None	84	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1394	E. coli (3 strains) and Salmonella Agona	Alfalfa sprouts	55	4	0	Advisory, 8/24
1402	Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:-	None	41	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1398	Cyclospora	None	22	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1392	Cyclospora	None	203	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1395	Salmonella Javiana	Jalapeno peppers	431	57	0	Advisory, 8/21
1379	Listeria monocytogenes	None	9	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1390	Cyclospora	Iceberg lettuce	10,930	454	2	Advisory, 8/20
1385	Cyclospora	None	28	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1384	Cyclospora	None	18	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1387	Salmonella Oranienburg	None	99	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1389	E. coli O145:H28	Frozen blueberries	12	4	0	Advisory, 7/30
1382	E. coli O157:H7	None	14	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1381	Cyclospora	None	2	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1383	Clostridium botulinum	Powdered infant formula	4	4	0	Advisory, 7/06
1378	Salmonella Enteritidis	Shell eggs	98	26	0	Advisory, 7/24
1380	Listeria monocytogenes	Requeson, soft ricotta	12	10	1	Advisory, 6/29
1375	Cyclospora	None	8	n/p	n/p	Table, 8/26
1358	Salmonella Typhimurium et al.	Moringa leaf powder	131	36	0	Advisory, closed
Total			12,201	595	3

Table 1. FDA CORE Active Investigations as published on August 26, 2026. Case, hospitalization and death figures taken from each outbreak advisory’s Case Counts block, or from the table itself where no advisory exists. The abbreviation n/p means not published. The nineteen case counts sum to 12,201; the eight published hospitalization figures sum to 595; deaths sum to 3. Compiled from the linked FDA pages, retrieved August 26, 2026.

Eleven of the nineteen name no food at all, and those eleven carry 528 people

Eleven rows read Not Yet Identified in the product column. Together they account for 528 illnesses. The oldest of them was posted June 3, which is eighty-four days ago. The largest is reference 1392, a Cyclospora file that has grown from 172 to 203 in a week. FDA also notes that reference 1398 grew because the incident now takes in additional illnesses based on similarities in reported exposures, which is the agency saying it has found a common exposure pattern in a file whose food it will not name.

That column is fair enough on a file opened last week. It is a different thing on a file opened in early June. Not Yet Identified is not a finding, and it is not a warning. It is a placeholder, and 528 people are sitting behind it.

Everything Sprouts issued the recall on August 22, and the distribution list is still two states

On August 21 FDA posted an advisory naming alfalfa sprouts from Everything Sprouts, LLC of Minneapolis as a source of illness and said it had recommended a recall. On August 22 the company issued one. The recalled product is 5-ounce plastic containers of alfalfa sprouts under the Calco and Everything Sprouts brands, lot numbers 222, 223, 225, 226 and 230, plus Everything Sprouts Crunchy Protein Sprout Mix cups in lots 222, 223, 226 and 230 and Zesty Garlic Mix cups in lots 222, 223, 225, 226 and 230. The sprouts went out between May 27 and August 21, 2026.

The outbreak is 55 people in fifteen states with four hospitalizations and no deaths, onsets running May 31 through August 8, and four organisms in one product: E. coli O26:H11, O103:H25 and O168:H8, plus Salmonella Agona. Two people were infected with both a Salmonella and an E. coli. Of the thirty-four people interviewed, twenty-six ate alfalfa sprouts. CDC carries the case counts by state.

Here is what the recall did not produce. FDA’s confirmed distribution is still Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the advisory says the agency is working to determine whether the product went anywhere else. Fifteen states have sick residents. Two states have a confirmed shipment. Those are states of residence rather than states of exposure, so the gap is not proof that product moved beyond the upper Midwest, but it is not evidence that it did not either. Anyone who bought sprouts in bulk and repackaged them for sale is being told to pull them without a customer list to work from.

The Listeria outbreak that killed someone has ended, and the page a consumer reads still shows June

FDA’s own What’s New entry says the Listeria monocytogenes outbreak linked to requeson and soft ricotta cheese has ended and that the advisory was updated on August 26 with final investigational information. When that page is fetched it still serves the June 29 version, stamped content current as of 06/29/2026, with the Status line reading Ongoing and the case counts at 12 sick, 10 hospitalized and one dead across Illinois, Maryland, New York and Virginia. Sample collection dates ran from March 6, 2023, to June 2, 2026, which makes it a three-year outbreak.

This is a caching problem on FDA’s side rather than a missing update, and the same thing has happened repeatedly on federal outbreak pages this summer. It matters anyway. The row on the master table now says the outbreak is over, and the page a worried reader actually lands on says the investigation is ongoing and shows figures from two months ago. One of those two pages is wrong at any given moment, and the reader has no way to tell which.

Ten of the nineteen have never had an on-site inspection

The inspection column is the one worth reading closely. Ten of the nineteen files show no on-site inspection initiated, including the second and third largest on the table, the 431-person jalapeno outbreak and the 203-person Cyclospora file. Nine have had one, and the pattern behind which nine is not subtle: an inspection happens where there is a named domestic firm to inspect. The frozen blueberry file shows the substitute, which is a remote regulatory assessment of a Chilean packer conducted by collecting records over the internet, followed by an import alert. Publix has since recalled all lots of the GreenWise organic frozen blueberries and mixed berries. A records review is a real regulatory tool. It is not the same thing as walking the ground.

Six of the nineteen say the outbreak has ended while the investigation is still carried as Active. One of them, the moringa leaf powder file at reference 1358, describes an outbreak CDC declared over and an FDA investigation the agency has called complete, and it is still sitting in the Active table. A separate moringa file, reference 1377, moved to the Closed 2026 table today and now has an Executive Incident Summary Abstract attached, which is the document that says what actually went wrong. That is how the system is supposed to work. Reference 1358 has been eligible for the same treatment for over a month.

The recalled eggs went out of date nine days ago and the page describing them is thirty-three days old

Table 2 measures each advisory against its own content-current stamp.

Ref #	Outbreak	Advisory last touched	Days old on Aug 26
1380	Listeria in requeson, one death	June 29, 2026	58
1383	Botulism in powdered infant formula	July 6, 2026	51
1378	Salmonella in shell eggs	July 24, 2026	33
1389	E. coli in frozen blueberries	July 30, 2026	27
1390	Cyclospora in iceberg lettuce	August 20, 2026	6
1395	Salmonella in jalapenos	August 21, 2026	5
1394	E. coli and Salmonella in alfalfa sprouts	August 24, 2026	2

Table 2. Days elapsed between each advisory’s own content-current stamp and August 26, 2026. Counted from the stamp printed at the foot of each linked FDA page, retrieved August 26, 2026. The requeson figure is the date the page currently serves; FDA states it was updated on August 26.

The egg advisory is the one that reads worst. The Midwest Poultry Services recall covered shell eggs with sell-by or best-by dates between July 20 and August 17, 2026, under the Country Morning, Cal-Maine Sunups, Brookshire’s, Simple Truth and Kroger labels. August 17 has passed. Every carton in that recall is now out of date, and the page telling consumers about it has not been touched in thirty-three days, with the count still at 98 sick across seventeen states. FDA’s own text says Midwest Poultry does not account for all the illnesses in that outbreak, and eleven of the seventeen states with sick people were never confirmed to have received the recalled eggs. That investigation is not finished and the page has stopped moving.

On the jalapeno side there is a genuine improvement worth naming. On August 20 FDA created a Major Product Recalls page collecting every downstream recall of products made with the recalled Sinaloa jalapenos distributed by Coast Citrus Distributors. That outbreak has spread through a dozen manufacturers and retailers, and until last week a consumer had to reconstruct the list from separate recall notices. One page is better. It is also the kind of thing that should exist on day one of a multi-company recall rather than five weeks in.

Three questions worth asking

I bought alfalfa sprouts recently. What do I check?

Look for the Calco or Everything Sprouts brand on 5-ounce plastic containers, and check the lot number against 222, 223, 225, 226 and 230. The same sprouts went into Everything Sprouts Crunchy Protein Sprout Mix and Zesty Garlic Mix cups. Throw them out or return them. If you froze sprouts without the packaging and cannot tell, throw them out. Wash and sanitize anything they touched, because E. coli and Salmonella both transfer to surfaces.

The recalled eggs are past their date. Does that mean it is over?

Not necessarily for you. Sell-by dates passing means the product should be out of stores; it does not mean it is out of refrigerators, and eggs are routinely used past the printed date. Check for plant code P-1950 or 0840962 with a Julian date between 157 and 184 printed on the side of the carton. It also does not mean the outbreak is resolved, because FDA has said this producer does not explain all 98 illnesses.

Eleven of these outbreaks name no food. Should I do anything about that?

There is nothing you can avoid, which is the problem. What you can do is make yourself countable. If you have been sick with prolonged watery diarrhea, bloody diarrhea, or a fever that will not break, ask your doctor for a stool culture rather than accepting a presumptive diagnosis, and ask the laboratory to keep the isolate. Sequencing an isolate is how a single illness becomes part of a cluster, and a cluster is what makes an agency name a food. The 528 people behind that Not Yet Identified column got there one confirmed test at a time.

The smallest file on the table is the powdered infant formula botulism investigation, four infants, four hospitalized, and it has not been updated since July 6. Small is not the same as unimportant when every case is a hospitalized baby.

Nineteen files. Twelve thousand two hundred and one people. Eleven outbreaks with no food named. Ten with no inspection. Six carried as Active with the outbreak already over. One advisory about a death that a reader today will see stamped June. The page is public, it is updated on a schedule, and almost nobody reads it.