I just landed from Norway a few hours ago after speaking at a food safety conference in Oslo for two days and chasing the Northern Lights for a few more.
On Oct. 2 the Food and Drug Administration closed its investigation of the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history and said where it found the parasite: in a tank of wastewater leaving the Taylor Farms de Mexico plant that shredded the lettuce, and in a drainage ditch at a grower that supplied it. The outbreak sickened 12,883 people in 21 states, hospitalized 570 and killed two. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 19,883 laboratory-confirmed cases this season, nearly 17 times the year before. Roughly 7,000 confirmed cases were never tied to any food. The CDC’s own burden model assumes about 83 illnesses for every confirmed case, which puts the real number in the hundreds of thousands.
The outbreak is over. However, nothing that allowed it has changed. The next growing season in central Mexico begins this fall, and the system that is supposed to catch the next parasite is smaller than it was when it missed this one.
What Washington did in the year before the outbreak
On July 1, 2025, the CDC cut FoodNet, its active surveillance program for foodborne infection, from eight pathogens to two, citing money; Cyclospora was among the six dropped. In March 2025 the Department of Health and Human Services clawed back $11.4 billion from state and local health departments, $8.9 billion of it the epidemiology and laboratory money states use to chase outbreaks. A federal court restored it, but only for the 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued; Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia were not among them. The same month the department announced 10,000 layoffs, 3,500 at the FDA and 2,400 at the CDC, and the Agriculture Department terminated the advisory committee that had written the government’s 2023 report on this parasite, saving $225,000 a year. The CDC laboratory that does the parasite’s genotyping drew most of its funding from U.S.A.I.D., which no longer exists; HHS says the lab was untouched by layoffs, and its former director says it is missing at least a third of its staff. The FDA laid off the staff who plan foreign inspection travel and coordinate with foreign governments, and reinstated them in August after the New York Times asked. Before this summer the FDA had last visited the Guanajuato plant in 2019. Congress set a goal of 19,200 foreign food inspections a year by 2016; in 2025 the agency made about 1,100.
The parasite research went the same way. Congress declined to fund two of the three Cyclospora projects at the Agriculture Department’s Beltsville research center for fiscal 2026, and staff at the two parasitology laboratories there were told in May to relocate or lose their jobs; one told NPR the work has effectively halted. Kalmia Kniel of the University of Delaware and her colleagues asked USDA for about $10 million, four years running, to develop a test for this parasite in water. The work is unfunded. USDA says its reviewers chose other projects.
The rule
In 2022 the FDA finished the food traceability rule that Congress ordered in 2011, requiring supply chain records within 24 hours. In March 2025 the administration pushed its January 2026 compliance date to July 2028, and the FDA’s own analysis of that delay, signed by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., put the forgone public health benefit at $112 million a year, and as much as $322 million, against $73 million a year in industry savings. In November 2025 Congress wrote the delay into law, barring the FDA from spending a dollar to enforce the rule before 2028. In July, Michigan’s health department asked Taco Bell for its supplier list three times over six days before the FDA had complete records on July 13. The recalled lettuce shipped from June 29 to July 16; 12 of those days went to paperwork the rule would have required in one.
The records clock was one of three delays. Bloomberg News, working from Michigan’s public records, reported that the state held a call with Taco Bell’s parent company on July 2 and asked in a follow-up email to discuss any intervention or notification that could be taken that week to reduce future cases; the public was told on July 16. Bloomberg also reported that when the FDA and CDC told Taylor Farms on July 15 that they believed its lettuce was the culprit and gave it until noon the next day to begin a recall, the deadline passed, two White House officials convened a call to walk through the evidence and review the draft press releases, and the announcements posted after 10 p.m. that night, naming Taco Bell and not the company. A federal health official put the cost of that back-and-forth at sixty hours. Taylor Farms said it did not ask to be left out.
What Congress did when the outbreak came
Congress wrote letters. Fifteen of them, none led by a Republican, and the majority holds every gavel. Not one has a published answer. No committee has held a hearing. The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on this parasite in 1998, and its chairman can issue a subpoena. The secretary of health and human services declared the outbreak under control on July 21, when the count was 1,644, and said the surveillance cuts were not cuts. The nominee to run the CDC, asked at her confirmation hearing in July whether she would restore Cyclospora reporting, would not commit.
What industry did
The produce industry’s answer was to point at the water. On July 15, before federal investigators had named a food, the International Fresh Produce Association faulted Michigan’s health department for dismissing recreational water as a source; the next day its chief science officer told a trade publication that Michigan was defying reputable science and invoked Flint. On Aug. 3 the association asked the CDC in writing to add questions about drinking water, recreational water and sewer overflows to its interviews with sick people, and its consumer page, frozen on Sept. 14, still says the association raised sewage overflows around Detroit and Toledo and Lake Erie as a possible source for the thousands of cases outside the lettuce cluster. Humans are this parasite’s only host, so nothing reaches a Detroit sewer that a person did not shed first, and Detroit does not drink Lake Erie water. On Aug. 20 the CDC said genotyping showed the parasites from sick people were genetically related to one another, and the FDA has now found the parasite in the company’s own wastewater.
Taylor Farms told the New York Times in August that its fecal indicator testing program covered all of its water sources and that every test had come back negative. Indicator tests look for bacteria. The FDA’s own methodfor this parasite looks for the parasite, and the FDA found it. The company’s outbreak page has not changed since Sept. 1, its newsroom lists no release on the outbreak, and its statement after the FDA’s finding dropped the grower and said nothing specific about the plant where the positive tank sits.
What it cost
The water story was also bad business. Taco Bell’s parent reported U.S. same-store sales down 2 percent through July 27. NielsenIQ recorded fresh lettuce unit sales down 9 percent in a week and 19 percent over two. Chopt’s traffic fell 12 percent though no illness was ever tied to it, and a greenhouse grower in the eastern United States with no connection to Mexico watched sales fall by double digits. Sweetgreen, which serves no iceberg lettuce and was never linked to the outbreak, cut its forecast for the year to a 7 to 8 percent decline in same-store sales and named the outbreak as the reason. Economists put the cost of the 2018 romaine outbreak at $276 million to $343 million, for an outbreak that sickened dozens. When the government cannot say which lettuce is contaminated, fear prices the whole category, which is the problem the traceability rule exists to solve.
There is an irony here the administration should feel. In January, Secretary Kennedy and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released new dietary guidelines that tell Americans, under the slogan eat real food, to eat vegetables and fruits throughout the day in whole form. Americans did the opposite this summer because nobody could tell them which salad was safe. You cannot make America healthy again while making Americans afraid of lettuce. A food safety system that can draw a line around one plant in Guanajuato and leave every other grower alone is not a tax on that agenda. It is the agenda.
What should happen before the 2027 growing season
The FDA itself set that season as the deadline for 10 commitments it published as it closed the investigation. Here is what should happen alongside them.
Congress should repeal the rider and put the traceability rule back on its calendar. Eleven consumer and food safety organizations asked for that in August. The produce association wants the rule, and so do the growers; the people on record asking for the delay are the retail, grocery, restaurant and food distribution associations. Congress should hold the hearing 15 letters could not get. And it should fund what it defunded: FoodNet back to eight pathogens; the epidemiology and laboratory grants for all 50 states, not just the ones that sued; the Beltsville research and the Delaware water test it has refused to pay for; and the Microbiological Data Program, which tested 15,000 produce samples a year for $4.5 million until it was zeroed out in 2012 at the produce industry’s urging, this time with the parasite on the panel. The USDA’s own economists price this parasite at $5.3 million a year. The testing program costs less than the disease.
The agencies should count. Put Cyclospora back in FoodNet, publish one national number, make the illness reportable in every state, and add the parasite to the national wastewater surveillance network. Name the growers; a citizen petition asking the FDA to name every firm in an outbreak has sat at the agency since February. Publish the investigation report and the genotype comparison, with a date. Name Cyclospora in the agricultural water rule, whose only numeric microbial standard is for E. coli, a test that cannot find a parasite. Inspect foreign plants on a schedule, not after an outbreak. Rehire the parasitologists. And stand up an independent board to investigate outbreaks across agency lines, an N.T.S.B. for food, as a former FDA deputy commissioner has urged.
Industry should get off the sidelines. Retire the water story. Put the lobbyists who asked for the delay to work asking for its repeal. Taylor Farms should publish the independent review it promised in July, test its water for the parasite rather than a stand-in, and say what changed before it reopens. And industry should pay for the wastewater surveillance in growing regions that its own association proposed.
Put me out of business
None of this is partisan. The produce testing program was created under President George W. Bush and ended under President Barack Obama. And none of it is new to me. In August 2002, after ConAgra recalled over 18 million pounds of ground beef, I wrote an op-ed asking the beef industry to put me out of business. Please, I wrote. I asked for four things: sample the meat, give the government mandatory recall authority, keep records of where every lot went, and put one agency in charge. The beef industry did not do all four. It did enough. My firm’s hamburger E. coli cases ran from Jack in the Box in 1993 to ConAgra in 2002 and are now close to zero, and that is the best thing that has happened in food safety in my lifetime. I have been suing lettuce companies for nearly 30 years, and the asks have not changed: sample, trace, name, and put someone in charge.
Congress, Secretary Kennedy, and the produce industry: put me out of the lettuce business. Please. The next crop is going in the ground.
Marler Clark represents hundreds of people sickened in this outbreak and has filed suits in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois.