Federal officials are poised to declare the end of the largest known Cyclospora outbreak in the history of the United States. I did not learn that from CDC or FDA. As I write this, CDC’s own outbreak page, stamped September 3, still lists the investigation as open. I learned it the way the country has learned a good deal about this outbreak, from a newspaper. Two people familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Rachel Roubein of the Washington Post this afternoon that the announcement could come as soon as today, though the timing is not guaranteed. The Department of Health and Human Services did not comment.
It is not the first time the explanation went to a reporter before it went to the public. When people asked why FDA waited nearly a month after naming Taylor Farms to send investigators into the fields in central Mexico, the answer came from Donald Prater, FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for food, in an earlier interview with the Post. The agency, he said, first worked to reconstruct conditions during growing and harvest so it could put its resources where they would count. That is a reasonable answer. It belongs on the agency’s outbreak page, where anyone can read it.
The outbreak count stopped. The counting did not.
The outbreak FDA and CDC attribute to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico stands at 11,458 illnesses in twenty states, at least 495 hospitalizations and two deaths in Michigan, with onsets from June 14 through August 15. Neither agency has changed that number since August 27, and on September 3 CDC said it would stop updating that page weekly.
The national count kept going. On September 8 CDC reported 19,595 laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis acquired in the United States since May 1, with 1,043 hospitalizations, in forty-nine states and the District of Columbia, against 1,180 for the same stretch of 2025. One week earlier the figure was 18,445. CDC also lists 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 a patient interview. The agency’s own page says reports take about six weeks to arrive and that it will keep finding cases after the season’s August 31 close. Michigan alone reported 14,718 cases and 366 hospitalizations as of September 3.
Subtract the outbreak from the national count and 8,137 laboratory-confirmed illnesses sit outside the lettuce outbreak with no food named. The two figures carry different dates, so treat that as approximate, but it is not small. The Post said it plainly: nobody has identified the source of those other outbreaks. Declaring the lettuce outbreak over does nothing for those people.
Over is a statement about the calendar, not the cause.
When CDC calls an outbreak over, it is making an epidemiological statement: new illnesses tied to the source have stopped arriving. It is not a finding about how the parasite got onto the lettuce. FDA says that work is ongoing, and I take the agency at its word. But I have watched how these end. In September 2020 CDC declared the Fresh Express bagged salad Cyclospora outbreak over, and FDA’s page still says the cause or source was not determined. In 2013 FDA let Taylor Farms de Mexico reopen its plant on the company’s commitment to test its products and water supply for the parasite, and thirteen years later I cannot find one public result. Today FDA also closed a fourteen-person E. coli O157:H7 outbreak on its outbreak investigation table, naming romaine lettuce and nobody who grew or processed it. An outbreak can be over while the question stays open for good.
Congress asked. Nobody has answered.
Between July 14 and August 13, members of the House and Senate sent thirteen letters about this outbreak to HHS, FDA, CDC and twice to the chief executive of Taylor Farms. Eight set a deadline. All eight have passed, the last on August 27. As of this afternoon I cannot find a published answer to any of them, and I cannot find a hearing noticed in any committee. I laid out that record yesterday. Nothing in it has changed, except that HHS now has one more question it declined to answer, this time from a reporter.
What I have proposed, and who has answered.
I have not just complained. Since July I have put specific fixes on the record, and each of them can be done with authority and tools that already exist.
Test agricultural water for the parasite itself. The generic E. coli testing the industry relies on does not tell you whether Cyclospora is present. FDA has had a validated laboratory method for finding the parasite in agricultural water since 2020. Growers in regions with a Cyclospora history should be using it, and the results should be public.
Put the traceability rule back on a calendar. Congress used Section 780 of last November’s continuing resolution to bar FDA from spending money on enforcing the Food Traceability Rule, whose compliance date had already slid to July 2028. The Consumer Federation of America’s review of this traceback found that records the rule would have required within twenty-four hours took nearly two weeks to arrive. Eleven consumer, public health and labor groups have asked Congress to reverse it. Unwind Section 780.
Pay for the people who do the counting and make testing free for people who cannot pay. In Lee County, Florida, a clinic serving mainly uninsured patients told a reporter it had stopped testing for the parasite because its patients could not afford it. A count is only as good as the people who can pay to get into it.
Name the grower and the processor when traceback converges on them, and do it in the outbreak notice, not months later in a lawsuit. And answer the mail or hold the hearing. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a Cyclospora hearing on imported raspberries in 1998, when the case count was in the hundreds.
None of this is exotic, and none of it needs a new agency. From the agencies that could act on it and the committees that could hold a hearing, I have heard nothing.
I know this kind of fix works because I watched one work. After Jack in the Box, USDA declared E. coliO157:H7 an adulterant in ground beef in 1994. The hamburger cases that filled my practice from 1993 to the 2002 ConAgra recall are now close to zero for my firm. It is the best thing that has happened in food safety in my lifetime, and it happened because somebody with authority decided to use it.
The file I am not closing.
The government may close the book on the lettuce today, or next week. The 8,137 people with no named source are not closed, and neither am I. Over the fall and winter, I will be working with epidemiologists on where those people got sick. When we find something, it will be here, with the documents, the day we have it. Nobody will need two anonymous sources.
Recent Comments