FDA updated its Investigations of Foodborne Illness Outbreaks table on September 30. The joint E. coliO157:H7 file I wrote about last week and again on Tuesday, FDA reference #1421 and USDA-FSIS reference 2026-04, went from 25 sick to 38, and FDA has initiated sample collection. The product line still reads Not Yet Identified. The Listeria file posted beside it on September 23, #1417, went from 40 to 44. A third Listeria file, #1415, was posted September 30 with eleven sick and no food named. The egg file and the infant formula file moved to the closed list.
That leaves sixteen active investigations, down from the seventeen I walked through on Tuesday off the September 25 stamp. Eleven name no food, and those eleven carry 675 sick people, up from ten files and 645. Add the counts FDA publishes on the advisories for the five named files, Graziers raw milk cheese (13), Evergreen broccoli sprouts (32), alfalfa sprouts (55), jalapeño peppers (431) and iceberg lettuce (12,883), and the table describes 14,089 illnesses, 642 hospitalizations where a number is given, and two deaths, both from Cyclospora.
Thirty-eight sick, samples at a laboratory, no food on the page
Reference #1421 was posted September 23 with 25 sick. One week later it is 38, a gain of thirteen, the largest one-week move on the table. FDA’s table definitions say the case count is supplied by CDC, and CDC’s own weekly page, updated September 30, now counts eight active multistate E. coli investigations, up from six the week before, 33 investigations in all. CDC still names none of them. There is no FDA advisory, no inspection marked, no states, no onset dates, no hospitalizations and no ages.
The new check mark is in the sampling column. FDA’s definition of that column is collection of samples for the presence or absence of a pathogen in a food or in the environment surrounding the food, collected by FDA or by a state and analyzed by FDA, with significant findings reported in a public health advisory. Read it plainly. Nobody samples a food they have not identified. A sample means investigators had a candidate product in hand, from a store shelf, a distributor or a sick person’s refrigerator, or an environment where that product was made, and sent it to a laboratory. The product column says Not Yet Identified. The sampling column says someone knows what to test.
The USDA side says more. FSIS’s outbreak table carries 2026-04 as its only active investigation of 2026, product Unknown, with a note that FSIS and FDA are investigating the outbreak together. The same page explains the rules: FSIS posts an investigation when there is compelling evidence that a meat, poultry or egg product is a confirmed or suspected source, and an outbreak appears on both tables when products regulated by both agencies are suspected sources. Two tables, one file, and by the agencies’ own rules a suspect on each side of the jurisdictional line.
That is why the two phone calls I described on Tuesday still matter. Two people, culture-confirmed, told by their health departments they are part of a multistate E. coli outbreak with no food named, and both bought a meat-and-vegetable sandwich wrap from the same chain in different states. My two epidemiologists have the state, local, CDC, FDA and FSIS records on order. I am still not naming the store, and two interviews are still not an epidemiologic study. But a wrap is precisely the food that produces a file with two reference numbers, meat from an FSIS-inspected plant, produce and tortilla from FDA’s side, and nothing posted September 30 cuts against it. CDC says it usually takes three to four weeks to match a sick person to an outbreak; the thirteen added this week got sick weeks ago.
The agencies have shown they can speak before the ingredient is settled. On October 22, 2024, FDA, FSIS and CDC announced the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder outbreak while, in FDA’s words, a specific ingredient had not yet been confirmed as the source. FDA said it was tracing the slivered onions, FSIS said it was tracing the beef patties, and McDonald’s pulled both the same day. Eight days later FSIS reported that its beef traceback found no beef source and that the patty samples were negative. The public knew what was in play from the first day. For #1421, at 38 and climbing, the public has two reference numbers.
The eleven files with no food named
| Ref. | Pathogen | Posted | Days | Sick (change) | FDA steps marked |
| 1415 | Listeria monocytogenes | 9/30 | 1 | 11 (new) | Traceback |
| 1421 | E. coli O157:H7 (USDA 2026-04) | 9/23 | 8 | 38 (+13) | Traceback, sampling |
| 1417 | Listeria monocytogenes | 9/23 | 8 | 44 (+4) | Traceback |
| 1403 | SalmonellaNewport | 8/26 | 36 | 116 (—) | Traceback, sampling |
| 1402 | Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:- |
8/12 | 50 | 43 (—) | Traceback, inspection, sampling |
| 1398 | Cyclospora(outbreak ended) | 8/5 | 57 | 22 (—) | Traceback, sampling |
| 1392 | Cyclospora(outbreak ended) | 7/22 | 71 | 235 (+1) | Traceback, sampling |
| 1379 | Listeria monocytogenes | 7/22 | 71 | 11 (+1) | Traceback, inspection, sampling |
| 1385 | Cyclospora(outbreak ended) | 7/8 | 85 | 38 (—) | Traceback, sampling |
| 1384 | Cyclospora(outbreak ended) | 7/8 | 85 | 18 (—) | Traceback |
| 1387 | SalmonellaOranienburg | 7/8 | 85 | 99 (—) | Traceback, inspection, sampling |
| Eleven files | 675 (+30) |
Counts from FDA’s table as posted September 30; changes measured against the September 25 stamp; days counted from the posting date to October 1, 2026.
Salmonella Newport, #1403, is the largest. Posted August 26 with 84 sick, it is 116 today, thirty-six days in, with traceback and sampling marked, no inspection, no advisory and no CDC notice. For scale, FDA closed a Newport file in 2025, #1291, at 36 sick with no food named, and closed this year’s Newport cantaloupe file, #1366, at 70. Salmonella Oranienburg, #1387, is the oldest: posted July 8, 85 days ago, 99 sick, with traceback, inspection and sampling all marked. Three tools, no food. Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:-, #1402, is 43 sick after fifty days with the same three check marks.
Three open Listeria files name no food, and together they hold 66 people. The table has no hospitalization or death columns, and for Listeria that omission matters more than for any other pathogen on the page. The last joint FDA–FSIS Listeria file, #1305, the 2025 ready-to-eat sandwich file, was ten sick, ten hospitalized and one dead on FDA’s own closing summary. Forty-four, the count on #1417 after eight days with traceback alone, is large by this table’s own standard: the five Listeria files FDA closed in 2025 without naming a food topped out at 36.
The four Cyclospora rows, 235, 38, 22 and 18, hold 313 people whose outbreaks have ended, by FDA’s own column, with the investigation still active and no food named. They are a sliver of the roughly 7,000 confirmed Cyclospora cases in CDC’s season count beyond the 12,883 in the iceberg lettuce outbreak.
How files like these usually end
FDA’s 2025 closed list, below the active table, is the base rate. It holds 26 investigations. Twelve closed with the product column reading Not Identified, and those twelve carry 286 people: five Listeria files, four Salmonella, one Cyclospora, one E. coli O145 and one hepatitis A. Nearly half of what FDA closed last year never named a food. The exceptions cut both ways. #1382, the O157 file posted July 1 with 14 sick and no food, closed September 10 with Romaine Lettuce in the product column and no grower or processor named. And #1305, the sandwich file, was not solved by traceback at all: FDA inspectors found the outbreak strain in a San Fernando plant on a routine visit in April 2025, months after the last illness, and even then the summary kept the sandwich as a suspect rather than a confirmed vehicle. A joint file is not a promise of an answer.
Two files closed
The egg file, #1378, which has read complete on its own advisory since September 3 and still read Active on the table Tuesday, is on the closed list: 134 sick, 34 hospitalized, 18 states, Midwest Poultry Services a likely source, and sick people in twelve states where no recalled egg was ever confirmed. The infant formula file, #1383, closed at four infants; FDA’s advisory says the outbreak investigation has ended while its root-cause work on the Organic West Milk and Dairy Farmers of America supply chain shared with the 2025 ByHeart outbreak continues.
Marler Clark represents people sickened in the iceberg lettuce and Kebab Shop kofta outbreaks, the family of a child who developed HUS in the Graziers outbreak, and families in the Nara and ByHeart infant formula outbreaks, and my office is investigating the two E. coli callers described above.
Sixteen open. Eleven with no food named, 675 people. One joint file at 38 and rising, with samples at a laboratory and a product line that says nothing. Somebody has already written a food on a sample label. Say what it is, say which states, and say which ingredient each agency is tracing.
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