CDC published a state-by-state breakdown of the Salmonella Javiana jalapeño outbreak along with its investigation notice. Twenty-seven states, 345 confirmed illnesses, 36 hospitalizations.
| State | Ill | State | Ill |
| Alabama | 1 | North Carolina | 3 |
| Arkansas | 1 | North Dakota | 1 |
| California | 1 | Nebraska | 5 |
| Colorado | 110 | Ohio | 2 |
| Georgia | 6 | Oklahoma | 8 |
| Illinois | 30 | South Carolina | 5 |
| Indiana | 6 | Tennessee | 3 |
| Kansas | 13 | Texas | 3 |
| Kentucky | 1 | Utah | 1 |
| Louisiana | 1 | Virginia | 2 |
| Michigan | 4 | Washington | 1 |
| Minnesota | 110 | Wisconsin | 9 |
| Missouri | 7 | Wyoming | 6 |
| Montana | 5 |
Look at the top of it first. Minnesota 110. Colorado 110. Two states, the same number, holding 220 of 345 cases between them — sixty-four percent of a national outbreak. Illinois is third with 30. After that the numbers collapse: Kansas 13, Wisconsin 9, Oklahoma 8, Missouri 7, and then a long tail of states reporting five, three, two, and one. Eight states report exactly one case.
Twenty-three states report none at all. Among them are New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Arizona, Massachusetts, Maryland, Oregon and Nevada. Roughly a third of the population of the United States lives in a state that has not reported a single illness in this outbreak.
Now do the thing nobody in the coverage has done, which is divide by population.
| State | Cases | Cases per million residents |
| Minnesota | 110 | 19.0 |
| Colorado | 110 | 18.5 |
| Wyoming | 6 | 10.2 |
| Montana | 5 | 4.4 |
| Kansas | 13 | 4.4 |
| Illinois | 30 | 2.4 |
| Wisconsin | 9 | 1.5 |
| Missouri | 7 | 1.1 |
| Georgia | 6 | 0.54 |
| Michigan | 4 | 0.40 |
| Ohio | 2 | 0.17 |
| Texas | 3 | 0.10 |
| California | 1 | 0.03 |
Minnesota is reporting Salmonella Javiana at roughly nineteen cases per million residents. California is reporting it at about two and a half cases per hundred million. Minnesota’s rate is on the order of seven hundred and fifty times California’s.
That is not a real difference in exposure. Nothing about this outbreak makes a Minnesotan seven hundred times likelier than a Californian to eat a contaminated jalapeño. Both states have Chipotle and QDOBA locations in every city of size. Both eat Mexican food. The peppers moved through a national distributor.
What differs is who is looking.
Consider Wyoming, which reports six cases from a population under six hundred thousand — the third-highest rate in the country. Montana and Kansas are next. These are not states anyone would nominate as the epicenter of a national foodborne outbreak, and they are not. They are states whose public health laboratories sequenced their Salmonella isolates and whose epidemiologists picked up the phone. Kansas alone reports more cases than California, Texas, Ohio, Virginia, Washington, Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Utah combined — eleven states with a hundred and thirty million people among them.
Minnesota’s advantage is not an accident either. Its foodborne illness unit — known in the trade as Team D, staffed largely by trained student epidemiologists who call patients fast — is one of the two or three best in the country and has been for thirty years. It found the tomatoes behind the 2015 Salmonella Newport outbreak at Chipotle. It named jalapeños in this one before any federal agency did. Colorado runs whole genome sequencing on every Salmonella isolate it receives, and said so publicly on July 28, a week before CDC posted anything.
Those two states are not overcounting. They are counting. Everybody else is undercounting, and the size of the undercount varies by state in a way that has nothing to do with where the food went.
Now stack the surveillance gap on top of the diagnostic gap, because they compound.
Even in Minnesota, the 110 confirmed cases are only the people who got sick enough to see a doctor, whose doctor ordered a stool culture, whose culture grew Salmonella, and whose isolate got sequenced and matched. CDC’s own burden research puts the ratio at roughly 38.6 infections for every culture-confirmed case (Voetsch AC, et al., Clinical Infectious Diseases 2004;38 Suppl 3:S127–S134), a figure the agency’s 2025 update using 2017–2019 FoodNet data revised to approximately 39 (Emerging Infectious Diseases 2025;31(4)). An intermediate estimate put it at 29.3 (Scallan E, et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 2011;17:7–15).
Apply that to the national figure and the 345 becomes something on the order of ten to thirteen thousand actual infections. Apply it to Minnesota alone and 110 becomes roughly four thousand Minnesotans. Apply it to California’s single reported case and the multiplier tells you almost nothing, because the problem in California is not that thirty-nine infections went undiagnosed behind one confirmed case. It is that we have no idea how many confirmed cases California would have had if California had looked the way Minnesota does.
That is the part worth sitting with. The undercount from underdiagnosis is measurable, and CDC has measured it. The undercount from uneven state surveillance is not measurable, because the missing cases were never tested in the first place. Nobody knows how large it is. Nobody can know.
There are consequences that run past epidemiology.
A recall’s urgency gets calibrated to the case count. So does the political pressure on a distributor, the attention a grower receives, and how quickly FDA decides something is actionable. When the count reflects surveillance capacity rather than the size of the outbreak, every one of those judgments is being made on a number that means something different from what it appears to mean.
For an individual, it is more concrete. Somebody in Phoenix or Tampa or Newark who ate a burrito in late June, spent four days miserable, and never got tested is in exactly the same physical position as one of Minnesota’s 110. The difference is that Minnesota’s 110 exist in the record, will be counted in whatever accounting eventually happens, and can point to a lab result. The person in Phoenix has a memory and a receipt.
And this is why, in every one of these outbreaks, the single most useful thing an ordinary sick person can do is ask for a stool culture — not just a rapid panel, an actual culture that produces an isolate a public health laboratory can sequence. It is the difference between being part of the count and being part of the gap.
One last observation about the map. The dark blue sits in the upper Midwest and the mountain West. The gray covers the Northeast, the Southeast and most of the Pacific coast. If you did not know better you would read that as a story about where the peppers were shipped.
It is a story about where the states are equipped to find them.