FoodNet exists because of a hamburger. When E. coli O157:H7 in Jack in the Box burgers killed four children and sickened hundreds of people across the West in 1992-93, it laid bare just how blind we were to what was making Americans sick — and out of that reckoning came the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Networkin 1995, CDC’s active, audited, boots-on-the-ground count of foodborne illness across a slice of the country big enough to speak for all of it. Cyclospora was added to that count in 1997.
On July 1, 2025, CDC quietly cut the list of pathogens states are required to report from eight down to two. Only Salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli stayed mandatory. The other six — Campylobacter, Cyclospora, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia — became optional.
Here is what optional looks like eleven months later. According to CDC’s own surveillance page, 843 people across 32 states had been sickened by Cyclospora acquired right here at home since May 1 as of July 9, with 18 hospitalized — and another 343 infected while traveling. Now hold that federal number next to a single state’s. Michigan — which isn’t even one of the ten FoodNet sites — was reporting more than 1,500 cases on its own dashboard by July 10, nearly double CDC’s entire national count. When one state’s tally runs past the whole country’s official number, that is not a busy summer. That is a surveillance system describing the weather a week after the storm.
No confirmed source. Investigators are chasing multiple clusters at once. This is the exact scenario FoodNet was built to catch, involving the exact pathogen CDC just told ten state health departments they no longer have to report. The bug they stopped requiring anyone to count is the one now spreading through a third of the states in the union.
Real credit belongs to CIDRAP and reporter Chris Dall, who dug into what the rollback actually means instead of taking the agency’s talking points at face value. They tracked down Craig Hedberg, one of the deans of foodborne disease epidemiology, who called FoodNet “the foundation of our food safety system, and needs further investments, not restrictions.”
They also quoted veterinary public health consultant Gail Hansen, who warned that gutting a national system that pooled and coordinated data across state lines drags us back to the pre-FoodNet era, when no one could see an outbreak crossing borders until it was already everywhere. That is not alarmism. That is a description of this summer.
HHS says Salmonella and STEC stayed mandatory because they are among the top five drivers of illness, hospitalization, and death, that other CDC systems track the rest, and that trimming FoodNet lets staff “prioritize core activities.” Cyclospora is the pathogen that exposes how hollow that answer is. According to experts I have spoken to, routine stool panels miss it — a clinician has to specifically order modified acid-fast staining or PCR, and because the parasite sheds intermittently, one negative sample proves nothing. The vehicle is almost always fresh produce that was eaten and thrown out weeks before anyone got a diagnosis. You do not find a bug like that by hoping “other systems” catch it. You find it by actively counting, by auditing the labs to make sure nothing slipped through, and by comparing notes across states fast enough to spot a cluster before the trail goes cold. That is the one thing FoodNet did that nothing else does, and it is precisely the thing they made optional.
Minnesota and Maryland have said they will keep tracking all eight pathogens anyway. Good for them. But food doesn’t respect state lines, and a surveillance network is only as strong as its weakest catchment. When the federal floor drops, the coverage map turns to Swiss cheese — and outbreaks live in the holes.
Every one of those cases is a person who spent days doubled over, some of them in a hospital bed, most of them never knowing where it came from. We owe them a system that counts. The moment to invest in catching the next outbreak is not after it has already reached a third of the country. It is now, and it was yesterday.