Reported cyclosporiasis cases by state, 2026 season. Gray states have confirmed cases but no public per-state count.
There are two counts of the same outbreak in circulation right now, and they are off by more than two thousand cases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 843 domestic cases of cyclosporiasis across 31 states since May 1, with another 1,500-plus the agency says still, “require further analysis” and 343 more tied to travel. The states—the ones actually counting—are already somewhere north of 2,900. An NBC News tally of state health-department data put it at 2,912. ABC News counted at least 2,944 across 32 states. TODAY had it over 3,100. Take your pick; every one of them dwarfs the federal figure.
Consider Michigan, which alone reports 1,562 cases—forty-four of them hospitalized—in a state that in a normal year sees about fifty Cyclospora infections total. That one state’s outbreak is larger than everything the CDC had confirmed nationwide a few weeks ago. Ohio is near 397, with Toledo’s Lucas County accounting for some three hundred of them. New York sits around 394, Illinois at 141, North Carolina at 110, Florida past 100, Colorado 90, Indiana 72, Texas 48. Georgia, one.
The ten states that have published a number. They account for nearly the entire national tally.
Those are the states that published a number. Most of the thirty-plus states caught up in this outbreak haven’t. They surface on the CDC’s map as a shaded bin—“up to 300,” “81 to 160”—or as a name with no figure beside it, or they don’t surface by name at all while still counting toward the national total. There is no complete, state-by-state ledger of this outbreak.
That’s not an accident. A year ago, Cyclospora was removed from the pathogens states are required to reportunder FoodNet, the CDC’s active surveillance network. Tracking went optional. So, a parasite that causes weeks of explosive, dehydrating diarrhea is likely moving through the summer produce supply while the federal government reads the situation through a windshield it fogged up itself. Michigan’s own chief medical executive said it plainly: Michigan looks like the epicenter in part because Michigan is actually looking. Aggressive investigation reads as a hotspot; silence reads as safety. Neither is the truth.
No source has been named. Investigators are working the usual suspects—raspberries, basil, cilantro, snow peas, mesclun, the imported fresh produce that has driven Cyclospora outbreaks for thirty years—but the week-plus lag between eating and getting sick makes it brutally hard for anyone to remember the meal that did it. Every day without a named source is another day of exposure.
The numbers say what they say. The outbreak is bigger than the government’s count, and the reason we can’t tell you how much bigger is that someone decided this parasite wasn’t worth tracking. The families filling clinics across southeast Michigan and northern Ohio would beg to differ.