The 2026 cyclosporiasis season closed on August 31. Between July 14 and August 13, thirteen letters went from members of the House and Senate to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to the acting heads of FDA and CDC, and twice to the chief executive of Taylor Farms. Eight of them set a date. Every one of those dates has now passed, the last on August 27. I cannot find a published answer to any of the thirteen, and I cannot find notice of a hearing anywhere. What is left is arithmetic.
The arithmetic
CDC last updated its national case data on September 1. Since May 1 it has received reports of 18,445 laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis acquired in the United States, with 990 hospitalizations and two deaths, across forty-nine states and the District of Columbia. For the same stretch of 2025 the number was 1,180.
This season is more than fifteen times last season.
The count does not stop there. CDC lists another 3,491 laboratory-confirmed cases still being sorted into domestic or travel-related and says it is aware of at least 13,505 additional cases that are not, yet laboratory confirmed or are waiting on a patient interview. Added up, that is 35,441 people the agency knows about. Another 1,900 travel-associated cases, with 66 hospitalizations, sit outside that total. The median patient is 46 years old, and the range runs from 1 to 99. The median illness began July 8. The most recent one CDC has recorded began August 22, nine days before the calendar said the season was over.
The outbreak FDA and CDC attribute to recalled Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce is a subset of that: 11,458 illnesses in twenty states, at least 495 hospitalizations, and both deaths. FDA’s investigation page has not moved since August 27.
State numbers are bigger, and they are not wrong. Michigan alone reported 14,718 cases and 366 hospitalizations as of September 3 — more than the entire national laboratory-confirmed count, because the state counts every case reported during its outbreak investigation while CDC counts only cases that meet its own confirmation criteria. Both numbers are honest. Only one of them is the number most people see.
The thirteen letters, and where they stand this morning
This is the same list I published on August 25. Nothing in the middle column has changed. The column on the right is the one to read.
“No answer found” means exactly that and nothing more. An agency can answer a member privately, and often does, and neither side has to publish it. If you have an answer to any of these, send it to me and I will correct this post and say plainly that I had it wrong. That is the column I would like to see.
The answers keep arriving somewhere else
Taylor Farms revised its Cyclospora information hub again, and the page now carries a September 1 date. Two things on it are new since I last wrote. The statement and the false-positive answer both now report that, according to FDA, there are no confirmed positive sample results for product testing for Cyclospora as of August 27, 2026 — the same day Senator Warren’s deadline ran out. And a new question takes on FDA’s “overwhelming epidemiological data” language head-on, arguing that epidemiology identifies a pattern but cannot confirm a specific product without a positive laboratory test. In answering it, the company discloses that its own testing, roughly 2,000 samples taken in central Mexico since May, returned zero positives.
Read that against the letters. Rep. Garcia asked for facility records going back to 2013. Sen. Blumenthal asked FDA and the company, separately, for all communications with the White House. Sen. Warren asked for the July call. None of it has been produced to anyone. The results of a sampling program have been produced, voluntarily, on a corporate website — unsworn, undated as to who tested what, written by the party with the most at stake, and revisable in place at two in the morning with no version history and no correction note.
I would rather have it than not have it. That is not my complaint. My complaint is that this is what the record looks like when nobody with subpoena power has asked for one.
Meanwhile the federal pages are slowing down
CDC’s iceberg lettuce outbreak page, updated September 3, says the agency is reducing the frequency of its web updates and that they will no longer take place on a weekly basis. FDA’s page has not been updated since August 27. The counting has not stopped, whatever the publishing schedule does. It takes about six weeks from the onset of symptoms to the day CDC receives a case, so illnesses that started in August are being added this month, and September cases are coming after those.
What would still work, and who is holding it
None of this needs a fourteenth letter. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations can issue a subpoena; Sen. Blumenthal wrote as its ranking member and copied Chairman Ron Johnson on both July 30 letters, and a ranking member cannot subpoena alone while a chairman can. The House Oversight majority can adopt Rep. Garcia’s document request and make it the committee’s request. The Senate HELP Committee has jurisdiction over both agencies. And Congress can strike Section 780 from the next funding bill rather than leave enforcement of the traceability rule barred until July 2028 — the provision that made this outbreak so much harder to trace in the first place.
That same subcommittee held a hearing on Cyclospora in imported raspberries in July 1998. Same subcommittee, same parasite, imported produce, twenty-eight years ago. The witnesses are identified. The questions are drafted, nine of them by Sen. Warren alone. What is missing is a room and a date.
Counting
A season is a bookkeeping convention. It tells CDC when to start a comparison and when to stop one, and it lets a health department decide the extra work is finished. It does not tell a parasite anything and it does not close a file. Two people are dead. Nine hundred ninety went to a hospital. Eighteen thousand four hundred forty-five have a laboratory-confirmed case with their name on it, and at least thirteen thousand five hundred more are still waiting to be counted. Nobody had to answer a letter this summer, and nobody did. Somebody should still have to answer for the rest of it, out loud, on a date certain, under oath.
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