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Opinion & Contributed Articles
Publisher’s Platform: Put me out of the lettuce business, please
The largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history is over, and the next crop is going in the ground. Washington dismantled the system that would have caught it, Congress wrote letters instead of holding a hearing, and the produce industry pointed at the water.
By Bill Marler
Published: October 03, 2026
Last updated: October 03, 2026
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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 October 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 USAID, which no longer exists.