As of July 9, the CDC counted 843 people sickened by Cyclospora since the season opened May 1 — up from 145 just three weeks earlier. The parasite didn’t suddenly get busier. The reporting caught up, in one of the slow, lumpy bursts that pass for real-time surveillance in this country. If you were watching only the number, you’d have missed nearly 700 people while the page sat still.
Here’s what makes that maddening: the data exists. It’s just scattered across weekly tables, PDFs, and a dedicated CDC page that updates whenever it updates. To see the shape of an outbreak, you have to go find the pieces and assemble them yourself.
Someone did. A Washington genomic epidemiologist named Krisandra Allen built a clean, source-linked tracker that pulls the CDC’s own Cyclospora numbers — the national notifiable-disease tables, the historical outbreak records going back to 1990 — and turns them into something a human being can actually read. State-by-state counts. A season curve you can watch climb. Thirty years of outbreak history, with the produce named: herbs, leafy greens, berries, the usual suspects. It’s the picture the public should have had all along, made by one person on her own time.
I want to be precise about what that is and isn’t. This is not the private sector riding to the rescue of a hollowed-out agency. It’s one expert making the government’s own data legible — and her tracker runs entirely on that government feed. Cut the reporting, thin the FoodNet surveillance that already dropped six of eight pathogens last year, and her dashboard goes dark right along with the official numbers. The thing that makes it useful is the same thing that makes it fragile.
None of this is bad luck. Cyclosporiasis is seasonal and predictable — it climbs every May, peaks in summer, and rides in on fresh produce we’ve been warned about for years. We know when it’s coming. We know roughly what carries it. What we don’t have is a system that tells us fast enough to keep the next person off the list. When the count can hide 700 illnesses behind a stale number, the people in that gap aren’t statistics — they’re kids and grandparents doubled over for weeks, wondering what they ate.
I’ve been saying since 1993 that outbreaks are foreseeable, traceable, and preventable. The tools to prove it keep getting better; Allen’s tracker is proof of that. The public commitment to fund and staff the reporting underneath them keeps getting worse. You can’t genotype your way out of a surveillance system nobody’s paying for.
Go look at her tracker. Bookmark it. Then ask your representatives why it took a volunteer to make the CDC’s data readable — and what happens to all of us the day the data stops.
Want to put me out of business? Keep the numbers flowing — and staff the people who collect them.