Michigan just did something the federal government still won’t: it named a suspect – lettuce and salad greens!
As of this morning, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services counts 2,640 people sickened by Cyclospora— a state that in a normal year logs 40 to 50 cases total. That’s a year’s worth of this parasite roughly every two days. Forty-four have been hospitalized. After more than a thousand patient interviews, the state’s chief medical executive, Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, named what the epidemiology has been circling for weeks: lettuce and salad greens. Lettuce, she said, is the product that “regularly comes up during the investigation.” The state is careful — no specific grower, no supplier, no brand, and other foods aren’t ruled out. But the word is finally on the page.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, and that’s the part worth sitting with. Prepackaged bagged salad is the repeat offender in Cyclospora history. Iowa and Nebraska both formally implicated a prewashed bagged salad mix — iceberg, romaine, red cabbage, carrots — in the big multistate outbreak of 2013. Salad greens came back around in 2018. Now, in 2026, two states’ investigators are landing on the same product category all over again.
Because it isn’t just Michigan. Ohio, the other epicenter, tells a split story. The Ohio Department of Health’s official line is that no common source has been identified. But its local health officials have been less guarded. Lorain County’s epidemiology supervisor said the sheer volume of cases is already narrowing the field toward a common produce item like lettuce, and the county’s health commissioner said he suspects a common, commercially produced food — “such as bagged lettuce or lettuce on fast food.” Two epicenters, the same quiet answer.
Now look at what the federal agencies are willing to say. The CDC counts 843 domestically acquired cases since May 1 and 86 hospitalizations but frames the national picture as several separate clusters and pointedly declines to call it one outbreak. The FDA’s outbreak table carries four open Cyclospora investigations, and every one of them has the product column left blank with traceback merely “initiated.” No advisory. No recall. No named food. The states are pointing at the salad bowl while Washington stares at an empty column.
There’s a reason for that empty column, and I’ve been shouting about it since last summer. On July 1, 2025, the CDC quietly shrank FoodNet — the surveillance system that hunts for foodborne illness by calling labs instead of waiting on paperwork — from eight tracked pathogens down to two. Cyclospora was one of the six cut loose. When a parasite that used to be watched closely comes roaring back to more than 3,000 cases across Michigan and Ohio, the machinery built to see it coming is running on a fraction of its eyesight. Even former CDC Director Robert Redfield told CNN this week that gutting these programs isn’t in the country’s interest. Bagdasarian is asking for exactly the national coordination the cuts took away.
And here is the cruelty of the timing. Cyclospora has an incubation period of up to two weeks, and the illness itself can drag on for a month or more — explosive, relapsing, hollowing. By the time a sick person is interviewed about the salad they ate three weeks ago, the bag is long in a garbage, and the lot number is a memory. Perishable product, complex distribution, a two-to-six-week look-back — the traceback was always going to be hard. Cutting the surveillance that flags the outbreak early only makes it harder. The source gets a head start, and it’s measured in cases.
If you’ve had days of watery, explosive diarrhea, ask your doctor specifically for a Cyclospora test — a routine stool panel will miss it. Buy whole heads of lettuce instead of the bagged, pre-washed kind, strip the outer leaves, and wash what’s left under running water. Cook your greens when you can; heat kills this parasite where rinsing won’t.
Michigan said the word. It’s long past time the rest of the country could see clearly enough to say it too.
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