Every summer, families fill their plates with the same fresh salads, chilled fruit, and garden vegetables they’ve eaten for years without a second thought. That habit depends on one quiet assumption: somebody is checking for danger before the food reaches the table. This summer, that assumption has failed — and the failure has a name, a date, and a body count.
Across dozens of states, a parasitic illness called cyclosporiasis is spreading fast. Patients describe days of “explosive” watery diarrhea, cramping, nausea, and exhaustion that can drag on for weeks. The sickness alone would be bad news. What turns it into a scandal is the timing: the federal early-warning system designed to catch exactly this kind of outbreak was dismantled just a year before the cases started climbing.
The Parasite Behind the Outbreak
Cyclospora cayetanensis is a microscopic parasite that travels through food or water tainted with human waste — usually the product of poor sanitation somewhere in the agricultural supply chain. It has no animal source. Previous U.S. outbreaks have been traced back to raspberries, basil, cilantro, and prewashed bagged salad — exactly the foods people reach for without thinking twice.
Most healthy adults recover on their own. Small children, older adults, pregnant women, and people with compromised immune systems face a much rougher road: symptoms that stretch on for weeks and can flare back up in waves. An antibiotic — trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole — treats it effectively, but only if a doctor thinks to test for it, and only if public health officials catch the outbreak pattern in time to warn people. Both of those depend on infrastructure that no longer exists in the form it used to.
Washington Pulled the Plug on Its Own Alarm
For almost thirty years, a joint CDC-USDA program called FoodNet tracked eight major foodborne pathogens — cyclospora, campylobacter, listeria, shigella, vibrio, yersinia, and more — catching unusual spikes early, before they turned into full-blown crises.
In July 2025, the Trump administration cut that list down to two: salmonella and E. coli. Tracking cyclospora and the other five pathogens became optional, left to whichever states bothered to keep doing it. That same year, the CDC shut down its entire Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria, dispersing the scientists who had spent careers learning to track parasites like this one.
Twelve months later, the country is facing its worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in years — with a fraction of the surveillance tools it had before the cuts.
Nobody Can See the Pattern Anymore
Investigators still haven’t pinned down a single source for the outbreak. The CDC says it has no proof the cases are linked as one multistate event — but tracing exactly that kind of connection was FoodNet’s whole job, and it’s a much harder job now that the system has been hollowed out.
Craig Hedberg, who teaches in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Minnesota, doesn’t accept the administration’s story that the cuts were reasonable cost-cutting. He has pushed back directly on the CDC’s claim that the surveillance was duplicative, warning that dismantling it “normalize[s] the idea that foodborne disease surveillance is expensive and unimportant” when in fact it is “the foundation of our food safety system.”
That’s the cruel logic of public health infrastructure: nobody notices it while it’s working. FoodNet’s daily, invisible labor goes unremarked — until it’s gone, and people start getting sick with no machinery left to stop it.
What Families Can Do Right Now
Investigators are still searching for the source. Until they find it, health officials recommend the basics: wash every piece of fresh produce under running water, including anything labeled “prewashed.” Cook leafy greens when possible, especially for children, pregnant women, and anyone immunocompromised. Skip prewashed bagged salad mixes entirely — they’ve caused outbreaks before.
If watery diarrhea in your household lasts more than a few days, see a doctor and ask specifically about cyclospora testing. Standard stool tests usually don’t screen for it automatically — you have to request it by name.
None of this advice is new. It’s the same guidance public health officials have given for years, and it still holds. But it’s also a reminder of where individual vigilance runs out. Stopping an outbreak before it reaches tens of thousands of people was never a job for individual families washing their lettuce a little harder. It’s a job for a coordinated, funded, always-on public health system — the exact system this administration chose to tear apart.
