CDC updated its Cyclospora case-data page today, September 8, 2026. It now reports 19,595 laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis acquired in this country since May 1, 1,043 hospitalizations, two deaths and cases in forty-nine states plus the District of Columbia, against 1,180 for the whole of last season. The federal outbreak linked to Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce is unchanged: 11,458 illnesses, at least 495 hospitalizations, two deaths and twenty states, on CDC and FDA pages last updated August 27. The fifty state health departments now report 33,548 cases this season.
Why the states report 33,548 and CDC reports 19,595.
Both numbers are right, and neither is the number of people who got sick. CDC counts laboratory-confirmed cases that meet its formal reporting criteria, inside the May 1 through August 31 season, and it takes about six weeks for a case to travel from a person’s first symptom to that column. A state health department counts what its own laboratories and providers report to it, usually in the week they report it. Several states, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas and Kentucky among them, count on a calendar year rather than on the season, so their totals carry illnesses from January through April. Some include probable cases and cases still pending classification. CDC excludes both.
The two series bracket each other rather than contradict each other. Underneath its confirmed 19,595, CDC says it has 9,355 laboratory-confirmed cases still being sorted into domestic or travel-acquired, and at least 6,149 more that are not laboratory confirmed or are waiting on an interview. Add those and CDC is aware of 35,099 cases this season. The fifty-state total of 33,548 sits between the 19,595 CDC has finished processing and the 35,099 it knows about, which is about where a count built from the states should land. It is also a floor: forty-one states publish a number, their as-of dates run from July 11 to September 4, and nine states publish nothing at all.
The national count rose by 1,150 in a week, and the last onset moved eight days later.
When CDC last posted, on September 1, the series stood at 18,445 confirmed and 990 hospitalizations. The move to 19,595 and 1,043 is 1,150 more people and 53 more hospital stays. Most of that is reporting lag on illnesses that began weeks ago. One number in the update is not lag. A week ago, the latest illness onset CDC listed was August 22. Today it is August 30, the day before the season closed. The median onset is still July 8, so the shape of the summer has not changed, but people were becoming ill through the end of August. The outbreak’s own last onset remains August 15, which means those late illnesses are not in the lettuce outbreak. Travel-associated cases, counted separately, are now 1,997.
The unattributed pile is now 8,137.
19,595 confirmed nationally, 11,458 in the outbreak. That leaves 8,137 confirmed illnesses this summer that CDC has not tied to the recalled lettuce or to anything else, up from 6,987 a week ago. The gap widened by exactly the week’s growth, 1,150, because every case CDC added went into the national series and none went into the outbreak. Roughly three in five confirmed illnesses now carry a federal attribution of any kind. Measured against what the states themselves report, it is closer to one in three.
FDA has open files on 303 of those 8,137 people.
The obvious question about an unattributed pile that size is whether anybody is looking. FDA’s active investigation table is where you find out, and the answer is that four Cyclospora investigations besides the lettuce outbreak are on it. Together they account for 303 people. Against 8,137 confirmed illnesses with no attributed source, that is about one in twenty-seven.
| Ref # | Posted | Cases | Outbreak status | Product linked | FDA steps taken |
| 1392 | Jul 22 | 225 | Ongoing | Not yet identified | Traceback, sampling |
| 1385 | Jul 8 | 38 | Ongoing | Not yet identified | Traceback, sampling |
| 1398 | Aug 5 | 22 | Ongoing | Not yet identified | Traceback, sampling |
| 1384 | Jul 8 | 18 | Ended | Not yet identified | Traceback only |
| All four | 303 | None |
Three things in that table are worth more than the arithmetic. FDA combined two previously separate clusters, references 1375 and 1381, into reference 1385, and it says it did so on traceback information from its own investigation. That is the same move that turned scattered restaurant clusters into the lettuce outbreak in July, when traceback converged on a single supplier. This time it produced a combined count of 38 and no product name.
Reference 1392 is 225 people, posted July 22. Traceback initiated, sampling initiated, and the inspection column is blank. Seven weeks on, it is the second-largest Cyclospora investigation in the country, and nobody has walked into a facility. Reference 1398 was posted August 5 and FDA initiated sampling this week, a month later. Reference 1384 has ended, and it ended without a food ever being named.
The point is not that FDA is idle. Traceback is running on all four and sampling on three. The point is the scale. Eight thousand people have no attributed source, and the federal government has an open file on three hundred of them.
The jury is still out on where these illnesses came from.
It is worth being plain about what is settled and what is not, because a season closing invites the wrong conclusion. One outbreak has a named source. CDC and FDA say epidemiologic and traceback data identified Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce, and CDC’s genotyping shows the parasites taken from sick people in that outbreak are genetically related to one another, which the agency calls additional evidence that those people got sick from the same source. That accounts for 11,458 illnesses.
It does not account for the other 8,137. North Carolina, now at 955 cases, says on its own dashboard that its increase does not appear to be associated with the outbreak in other states involving Taco Bell, and that its patients have reported eating parsley and cilantro more often than a population-wide baseline would predict. Wake County, which holds 521 of those cases, says no single source of infection has been identified and that investigations are ongoing. FDA has four open Cyclospora files and every one of them reads Not Yet Identified. Kansas told the public in July that its cases were not connected to the national outbreaks, then reported a week later that some of them were. That is what an unresolved investigation looks like from the outside.
And it is not finished. The last illness onset CDC lists is August 30. The counting runs into mid-October. Two of the four open FDA investigations were posted within the last six weeks, and one of them received its first sampling this month. Whatever made roughly eight thousand Americans sick this summer without a name attached to it, we are going into fall without knowing what it was, and there is no reason built into the calendar for it to stop.
CDC restructured its pending piles for the second time in eight days.
CDC now lists 9,355 laboratory-confirmed cases still being sorted into domestic or travel-acquired, plus at least 6,149 more that are not laboratory confirmed or are waiting on a patient interview. On September 1 those two figures were 3,491 and 13,505. The unconfirmed pile fell by 7,356 while the sorting pile rose by 5,864, which is what it looks like when a backlog of specimens finally gets typed. That is the system working. It also means the week-over-week figures are not comparable, for the second update running, and I am not going to pretend they are. Add the three categories together and CDC is aware of 35,099 cyclosporiasis cases this season.
Neither the outbreak count nor FDA’s page has moved since August 27.
CDC’s outbreak page carries a September 3 date stamp, but the number underneath it is twelve days old, and CDC has said it will no longer update on a weekly basis. FDA’s advisory is content-current as of August 27. Both agencies still describe the investigation as open, FDA still has inspections and sampling running at the growers and the processing plant in Mexico, and CDC says counting continues about six weeks past the August 31 close of the season, into mid-October. The counting continues. The publishing has slowed to a stop.
Virginia is the fifth counter to step back, and Michigan will not report again until October 1.
The Virginia Department of Health has ended the weekly table it kept all summer. Starting September 1, the state says, it has resumed normal case reporting, and Virginia’s figures now live in a monthly morbidity report. Its final weekly entry, dated August 31, is 242 cases: 144 acquired in Virginia, 66 abroad, 32 unknown or pending. That is eight more than the 234 I have been carrying, and it moves the fifty-state total to 33,548. Michigan now updates on the first Thursday of each month, so its September 3 figures, 14,718 cases and 366 hospitalizations, stand until October 1. Indiana froze at 2,104. CDC dropped its weekly cadence. Ohio has published no statewide number since 5,452 on August 13, twenty-six days ago. Five counters have stepped back inside eight days, in an outbreak whose own federal agency says the cases will keep arriving until mid-October.
Here is where all fifty states stand, with CDC’s number beside each one.
The Lettuce column is whether FDA has confirmed the recalled product reached that state. The last column is whether anybody has tied that state’s illnesses to Taylor Farms at all. Thirty-one states received the lettuce. Twenty are in the federal outbreak. Every count is a floor.
| State | 2026 cases | As of | CDC Aug 27 | All of 2025 | Lettuce | Taylor Farms |
| Michigan | 14,718 | Sep 3 | 4,846 | 50 | Yes | Linked |
| Ohio | 5,452 | Aug 13 | 2,679 | 76 | Yes | Linked |
| Missouri | 2,152 | Aug 23 | 1,010 | none reported | Yes | Linked |
| Indiana | 2,104 | Sep 2 | 823 | 27 | Yes | Linked |
| Illinois | 1,437 | Aug 18 | 278 | 301 | Yes | Linked |
| North Carolina | 955 | Sep 1 | 2 | 300 | Yes | Linked |
| New York | 939 | Aug 17 | 0 | 694 | Yes | Unknown |
| Kansas | 829 | Aug 26 | 331 | 29 | Yes | Linked |
| Kentucky | 819 | Aug 12 | 329 | 45 | Yes | Linked |
| Oklahoma | 556 | Aug 25 | 241 | 41 | Yes | Linked |
| Florida | 450 | Aug 15 | 0 | 210 | Yes | Unknown |
| Iowa | 327 | Aug 20 | 130 | 64 | Yes | Linked |
| Texas | 315 | Aug 11 | 20 | 512 | Yes | Linked |
| West Virginia | 315 | Sep 4 | 160 | 8 | Yes | Linked |
| Arkansas | 287 | Aug 25 | 82 | 13 | Yes | Linked |
| Wisconsin | 284 | Aug 26 | 0 | 65 | Yes | Unknown |
| Virginia | 242 | Aug 31 | 0 | 115 | Yes | Unknown |
| Nebraska | 218 | Aug 6 | 199 | 51 | Yes | Linked |
| Pennsylvania | 214 | Aug 11 | 244 | not notifiable | Yes | Linked |
| Colorado | 150 | Jul 17 | 0 | 205 | No | Unknown |
| Massachusetts | 147 | Aug 5 | 18 | 74 | Yes | Linked |
| New Hampshire | 94 | Aug 25 | 42 | 7 | Yes | Linked |
| Alabama | 85 | Aug 3 | 0 | 19 | Yes | Unknown |
| Washington | 76 | Aug 28 | 0 | not available | May have | Travel link |
| Maryland | 69 | Jul 17 | 0 | 123 | Yes | No link found |
| New Jersey | 46 | Jul 11 | 0 | 180 | Yes | Unknown |
| Tennessee | 44 | Jul 16 | 5 | 38 | Yes | Linked |
| California | 41 | Jul 14 | 0 | not available | May have | Unknown |
| Minnesota | 41 | Jul 17 | 0 | none reported | No | Unknown |
| Connecticut | 35 | Jul 17 | 0 | 41 | Yes | Unknown |
| Maine | 27 | Aug 7 | 16 | 4 | Yes | Linked |
| Oregon | 23 | Jul 24 | 0 | not available | No | Travel link |
| Arizona | 19 | Jul 17 | 0 | 49 | No | Unknown |
| Georgia | 11 | Jul 17 | 3 | 116 | Yes | Linked |
| Mississippi | 7 | Jul 22 | 0 | not notifiable | Yes | Unknown |
| Hawaii | 6 | Aug 26 | 0 | not available | No | No link found |
| Alaska | 5 | Jul 16 | 0 | 6 | No | Unknown |
| Rhode Island | 4 | Jul 17 | 0 | 6 | May have | No link found |
| South Dakota | 3 | Jul 16 | 0 | 3 | May have | Unknown |
| Louisiana | 1 | Jul 17 | 0 | 99 | Yes | Unknown |
| Utah | 1 | Jul 17 | 0 | 37 | No | No link found |
| Delaware | no count published | — | 0 | 1 | May have | Unknown |
| Idaho | no count published | — | 0 | not notifiable | No | Unknown |
| Montana | no count published | — | 0 | 8 | No | Unknown |
| Nevada | no count published | — | 0 | not notifiable | No | Unknown |
| New Mexico | no count published | — | 0 | 9 | No | No link found |
| North Dakota | no count published | — | 0 | 4 | May have | Unknown |
| South Carolina | no count published | — | 0 | 45 | Yes | Unknown |
| Vermont | no count published | — | 0 | 3 | May have | Unknown |
| Wyoming | no count published | — | 0 | 0 | No | Unknown |
| All fifty states | 33,548 | 11,458 | 31 | 20 |
What the week actually shows.
The season has been closed for eight days, and the count has grown by 1,150 since. Two people are dead, 1,043 people have been hospitalized, the states willing to print a number printed 33,548 of them, and 8,137 confirmed illnesses this summer have no attributed source at all, with an open federal file on 303 of them. The lot-level traceability records that would let anyone walk this lettuce back to a field in days rather than weeks are not required until July 2028. Every count above is a floor.
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