The 2026 Cyclospora season closed on August 31. CDC’s national count for May 1 through August 31 is 18,445 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases, 990 hospitalizations, two deaths and forty-nine states plus the District of Columbia, against 1,180 cases in the same stretch of 2025. I went back through four weeks of the public record, August 11 to today, and read what the people who are supposed to answer for this have said. This is the whole of it.
The company answered. It answered on its own website.
Taylor Farms has rebuilt its outbreak statement into a Cyclospora information hub. The page’s own modified date is September 1. The company says it has taken roughly 2,000 samples in central Mexico since May with zero positives, and pairs that with FDA’s position that there are no confirmed positive product tests as of August 27. It says it has suspended all iceberg sourcing from central Mexico for the season and that its leafy greens are now grown in the United States and Canada.
Two of the new questions are answers to charges. Asked whether the company opposes traceability legislation, it calls that absolutely false and says it fully supports the Food Traceability Rule and implemented traceback protocols ahead of the deadline. Asked whether it used political connections or contributions to influence the FDA investigation, it says no and categorically rejects the suggestion.
The third new item is a day-by-day account of July 15 through July 19. The company says FDA and CDC first shared traceback and epidemiologic data on July 15, that it raised questions about the government’s assumptions, methodology and cluster determinations, and that on July 16 those questions were discussed further with government counsel and officials from FDA, HHS and the White House. It decided to recall that day and announced it on July 17.
Read that against the mail. Representative Robert Garcia asked the company for every communication with the White House. Senator Richard Blumenthal asked FDA and the company for all communications with the Executive Office of the President. Neither produced an answer. The company’s marketing site now contains a partial one, with no document attached and nobody under oath.
FDA’s answer was a guidance nobody has to follow.
On August 11 the agency finalized its Guide to Minimize Biological Hazards in Ready-to-Eat Fresh-Cut Produce, with the Federal Register notice on August 12, replacing a draft that had sat since 2018. It is aimed at processors of chopped lettuce, cut melon and diced onions, and recommends sanitation controls, supplier verification and safe water. It names Cyclospora among the hazards, and it notes that antimicrobial wash water may not control this parasite, so supply-chain controls may be needed instead. It is not legally binding.
A Taylor Farms spokesperson told reporters the same week that the company is already in compliance with the final guidance. The acting FDA commissioner went on CNBC that Tuesday to say Americans should feel confident eating leafy greens, and HHS posted that Cyclospora was contained and American food was safe.
The largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history produced a recommendation that the implicated company met before the ink was dry.
Then both agencies went quiet.
FDA updated its outbreak advisory weekly through the summer, on August 13, 20 and August 27, when the count reached 11,458 illnesses in twenty states with 495 hospitalizations, two deaths and a last onset of August 15. Nothing since, twelve days after a weekly cadence. The page still says sampling at the growers and the plant is ongoing. That inspection began August 13. No findings and no Form 483 are public. On August 28 the agency classified the recall Class I and published an explainer stressing that classification is routine and not an escalation.
On September 3, CDC’s outbreak page said it is reducing the frequency of its web updates as new case reports decline, and that updates will no longer happen weekly.
Do the subtraction. The national confirmed count is 18,445 and the outbreak attributed to the lettuce is 11,458. That leaves roughly seven thousand laboratory-confirmed Americans made sick this summer who have never been told what they ate, and the counting is now slowing on both pages at once.
Mexico tested again, and again found nothing.
On August 11 the Quintana Roo state government published COFEPRIS’s finding that every sample from sixteen Riviera Maya hotels, thirty-two of food and eleven of drinking water, came back negative for Cyclospora cayetanensis. That sampling answered a UK Health Security Agency report of sixty-seven cases, forty-eight of them in patients who had been to Mexico. On the lettuce plant, Mexico has said nothing since August 7, when the head of Cofepris said the results do not confirm the hypothesis, that the hypothesis still stands, and that a Mexican origin has not been proven. Two rounds of negative sampling, for a parasite that cannot be cultured and is hard to recover from food or water. That is the expected result, not an exoneration, and the regulator has not called it one.
The trade association moved, and it moved toward the evidence.
The International Fresh Produce Association rewrote its consumer Cyclospora FAQ and stamped it September 4. In July its chief science officer was saying that assigning blame is not the same as identifying a source. The page now asks whether a specific food has been identified and answers yes, at 11,458 confirmed cases in twenty states, and explains that the absence of a positive sample does not make the epidemiological and traceback findings wrong, because the food is usually gone before testing is possible.
The same page carries the 236,192-case recall figure and says nearly half of it went to Walmart for Marketside, with Taco Bell only a fraction. It says the July 18 positive came from routine import sampling, not the recalled product.
Where I part company with them: the Lake Erie hypothesis.
Where the association pushes back, it pushes on the unattributed clusters rather than the lettuce. It raises municipal sewage overflows in the greater Detroit and Toledo region and their effect on well water and on Lake Erie, pointing to combined sewer overflow activity in mid-June, while saying the confirmed subcluster runs through an imported product from central Mexico. I do not think the water story holds, and the reason is the life cycle its own page explains a few sections earlier.
Humans are the only known host, so nothing reaches a sewer in Detroit or Toledo that a person did not shed first. And people shed oocysts unsporulated, not yet infectious, needing one to two weeks in a warm, wet environment before they can make anyone else sick. Put those two facts together and the hypothesis eats itself. For a mid-June overflow to carry Cyclospora in any quantity, a great many people in southeast Michigan and northwest Ohio had to be infected already in late May, and in a country where this parasite is not endemic, they got it from something, which is nearly always imported produce. The theory needs the outbreak to explain the outbreak. If anything, the arrow points the other way, since an outbreak this size is what would put oocysts into those sewers.
The rest of the chain is thin. Documented waterborne cyclosporiasis is rare and mostly foreign: Nepal in 1992 and 1994, a well in Haiti, a rooftop storage reservoir at a Chicago hospital in 1990 and scattered single cases. The 1995 American tap-water cluster is the one usually cited, and no oocysts were ever recovered from the water, with a follow-up study concluding it may have been food after all. Chlorine does not kill this parasite, which the association is right to raise, but an eight-to-ten-micron oocyst is what filtration at a Great Lakes water plant is built to remove, and an overflow discharges into the lake, not into finished water. Cyclospora does not appear in CDC’s recreational water outbreak reporting, where Cryptosporidium dominates. And the map does not cooperate: Michigan’s cases run across more than seventy counties, most nowhere near those sewers, in a season that reached forty-nine states.
Then look at what the theory would have to explain. Michigan counted more than eleven thousand cases across more than seventy counties, and Michigan has two counties on Lake Erie. Detroit does not drink Lake Erie water at all: the Great Lakes Water Authority serves about four million people in roughly 127 southeast Michigan communities from three intakes, one in Lake Huron and two in the Detroit River, every one of them upstream of the lake those sewers discharge into. Ohio counted about four thousand cases statewide, not in the Toledo suburbs. And the season reached forty-nine states and the District of Columbia. Whatever sickened people in Texas, Arizona and Washington did not come out of a combined sewer in Ohio. The calendar does not cooperate either. CDC opens the season May 1, and cases were accumulating well before the mid-June rainfall the association points to, with a median onset of July 8. A regional water event in the third week of June cannot cause illnesses that began in May.
What I do grant is the narrow part of the ask. Adding water questions to the patient questionnaire costs almost nothing, and the seven thousand cases with no food named deserve that work. Granting that is not granting Lake Erie.
Three admissions there are worth keeping. There is no FDA guidance and no validated Cyclospora-specific protocol telling growers how to prevent this, which the association calls a real gap rather than an oversight. Good Agricultural Practices were never validated against this parasite. And on the traceability rule, it says the effect of the delay cannot be quantified but the underlying gap is real. It also proposes an FDA-led root cause task force and says it understands FDA plans one of its own.
The California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, by contrast, has said nothing new. Its official news page still shows the July 20 statement as its most recent release, and its last posted article is dated July 23. Through the worst four weeks of the season, the program certifying ninety percent of this country’s leafy greens said nothing.
The bill arrived at the register.
Circana’s fresh foods group laid out the damage in The Packer this morning. Between July 19 and August 23, produce went from steady two percent dollar growth to a six percent decline and has stayed down five to six percent every week since, with fresh salads and leafy greens off twenty-seven percent in dollars. Eighty-three percent of shoppers surveyed said they had changed their behavior, and seven in ten of those named produce. Forty of sixty produce subcategories were down.
The industry has paid for this outbreak at the register, and it is paying for the unfinished investigation too. Meanwhile foreign food-facility inspections fell nearly thirteen percent in fiscal 2025 while imports kept rising.
The consumer groups said it first and said it with documents.
The sharpest thing written about this outbreak in the last four weeks did not come from a company, an agency or a trade group. It came from Thomas Gremillion at the Consumer Federation of America on September 1, under the title Tracing a Monumental Food Safety Failure. Working from the New York Times reporting and from FDA, he lays out the traceback as it actually went. Taco Bell took nearly two weeks to hand over records that would have been due within twenty-four hours under the traceability rule, then declined to name Taylor Farms at all, citing the need to protect confidential commercial information. Taylor Farms then stalled for nearly a week, according to FDA, before identifying the location of the farms in Mexico where the lettuce was grown, and the location description of the harvest farm is one of the key data elements the rule requires inside twenty-four hours. Kroger had already made its suppliers comply, so the recordkeeping existed.
Hold that against the company hub, which says the company supports the rule and put traceback protocols in place ahead of the compliance deadline. Same rule, same outbreak, two accounts, and one of them is sourced to the agency running the traceback.
The Safe Food Coalition got there three weeks earlier. In an August 12 letter to House and Senate leadership, eleven organizations, among them the Center for Food Safety, CSPI, the Consumer Federation, Consumer Reports, the Government Accountability Project, the National Consumers League, Stop Foodborne Illness, UFCW and U.S. PIRG, urged Congress to reverse the freeze on traceability funding, and said the crisis in consumer confidence was caused in part by the company’s failure to give the public information the rule requires in a recall notice. On August 27, Sandra Eskin of Stop Foodborne Illness told NPR what the numbers mean in plain language, that nothing like this has happened before and that people are now watching recalls in a way they did not use to.
Two more facts from the Consumer Federation piece belong in the government column. FDA is investigating nineteen foodborne illness clusters right now, and in a recent meeting with consumer advocates its officials said there have never been more open at once. And the Justice Department unit that used to prosecute food safety cases, the one that brought the Peanut Corporation of America case, was disbanded in April 2025.
Thirteen letters, no answers, and no hearing on any calendar.
Between July 14 and August 13, members of Congress sent thirteen separate letters about this outbreak. Five out of the House and eight out of the Senate. They went to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to the acting heads of FDA and CDC, and twice to the chief executive of Taylor Farms. Every one was written by a Democrat. Eight set a dated deadline and all eight have passed, the last being Senator Elizabeth Warren’s nine questions, due August 27. I cannot find a published answer to any of them.
There is no hearing. I have checked the committee calendars and cannot find one noticed on this outbreak anywhere, not in House Energy and Commerce, not in House Oversight, not in Senate HELP, not in the subcommittee that funds FDA. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a Cyclospora hearing on imported raspberries in July 1998, when the case count was in the hundreds. This one is in the tens of thousands, with two dead, and nobody has booked a room.
A letter creates a date on which somebody either answered or did not. Thirteen times this summer, the answer was did not. A subpoena creates an appearance. After eight expired deadlines, that is the difference that matters.
Four questions for whoever finally holds the hearing.
Who was in the July 16 meeting, and what was said? The company has told the public that FDA, HHS and White House officials were on that call and that it decided to recall the same day. Congress asked twice and got nothing, and the documents exist. What did the inspection find? FDA has had investigators at the growers and the plant since August 13, and the public has not seen a page of it.
Where did the other seven thousand come from? Those cases sit outside the lettuce outbreak with no vehicle named, and both federal pages have slowed their updates. Over the coming months I will be working with epidemiologists to answer that ourselves, because nobody else is publicly trying. And why was the federal answer a non-binding guidance, when the traceability rule that would have made this traceback faster sits at a July 2028 compliance date?
The season is closed and the counting is slowing. The company has answered in the one venue it controls completely, and its own trade association has moved closer to the evidence than the government has. The room in Washington with a subpoena and an oath in it remains empty.