Saturday, July 11, 2026
Four outbreaks, no confirmed source, and a national surveillance system now watching a fraction of what it did a year ago. That was the food safety week in America. A parasite most people can’t pronounce has sickened well past a thousand, a Tampa buffet was growing Listeria on its own counters, and frozen blueberries shipped up from Chile put people in the hospital. None of it was random. All of it was foreseeable. Here’s what moved.
The Cyclospora surge nobody can source — or fully count. CDC’s own numbers show 843 confirmed domestic cases since May 1, and the agency openly concedes it is aware of more than 1,500 additional cases still being sorted out — while news tallies already put the real toll past 1,700. Michigan alone is carrying close to 700 cases, roughly thirteen times a normal year, clustered around Detroit. Eighty-six hospitalized, no deaths, thirty-one states. Here’s the tell: the CDC admits states are seeing higher counts than its data reflects. When the agency counting the sick concedes it is behind the states doing the actual counting, that isn’t a data quirk. It’s a blind spot with a cause — more in a moment.
A Tampa buffet that grew its own outbreak. Florida health officials tied a listeriosis outbreak to China Buffet on East Fowler Avenue near USF — five sick, four who ate there between March and June, and environmental swabs positive for the same strain of Listeria monocytogenes making people sick. Epidemiology plus a matching isolate off the restaurant’s own surfaces is about as clean as causation gets. I wrote about it Thursday: an address with a long Dirty Dining record, and Listeria colonizes exactly where sanitation gets ignored. Ate there between April 9 and June 28? Symptoms can take up to ten weeks to surface.
Chilean blueberries and a hospital ward. Frozen GreenWise organic blueberries sold at Publix across eight Southern states were recalled July 3 after twelve people were infected with E. coli O145:H28 and four were hospitalized. The berries trace to a grower in San Carlos, Chile. Frozen fruit nobody thinks to worry about, an imported supply chain, and a pathogen that puts kids in the hospital.
Four outbreaks, and investigators can’t name the food. Beyond the blueberries, the FDA’s outbreak table is carrying a stack of investigations with no product identified: a Salmonella Oranienburg cluster, a fourteen-case E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, and two separate Cyclospora clusters — every one “traceback initiated,” every one source unknown. Four active outbreaks where the single question that matters — what food is doing this — has no answer yet.
The infant botulism cases aren’t going away. The FDA updated its advisory July 6 on the Clostridium botulinum outbreak tied to Nara Organics whole-milk powdered infant formula. These are babies. I represent families in these cases, and the timeline is the argument: botulism in powdered infant formula was flagged as a known hazard years ago. “Foreseeable” isn’t a theory here. It’s the record.
Two Salmonella recalls worth a glance. Fresh & Ready Foods pulled chicken-fillet burger products after raw breaded patties were used in place of fully cooked ones — a Salmonella risk manufactured by a swap that never should have happened. And Trafa Pharmaceutical recalled organic moringa leaf powder over possible Salmonella, one more thread in a moringa story that keeps unspooling.
And the reason so much of this stays invisible: as of July 1, 2025, the CDC’s FoodNet program made tracking Cyclospora optional, leaving states formally required to watch for just two pathogens — Salmonella and Shiga toxin–producing E. coli. The same summer a Cyclospora outbreak blows past 1,700 cases, the surveillance built to catch it has been switched off. The outbreaks are foreseeable. The blindness is a choice.
That’s the week — a parasite, a buffet, imported berries, and a surveillance system that keeps deciding it would rather not know. Every one of these was preventable, which is the whole reason to do this every Saturday. If enough of us keep pushing, maybe some weekend this column runs short for lack of material. Want to help put me out of business? Check back next Saturday.
About Bill Marler
William “Bill” Marler has spent more than thirty years as a food safety lawyer and advocate—work that began with the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak and has never really stopped since. In the years that followed, he has represented victims in nearly every major foodborne illness outbreak in the United States. That case, and the movement it launched, is the subject of the book “Poisoned” and the Emmy Award–winning Netflix documentary of the same name. Bill’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker (“A Bug in the System”), the Seattle Times (“30 years after the deadly E. coli outbreak, a Seattle attorney still fights for food safety”), the Washington Post (“He helped make burgers safer. Now he’s fighting food poisoning again”), and many others.
Dozens of times a year, Bill speaks to industry, regulators, and universities across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, China, and Australia about a simple idea: outbreaks are preventable. He has testified before Congress on the Food Safety Modernization Act and teaches food safety at institutions including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He writes regularly about food litigation and food safety at Marler Blog, and in 2009 he founded Food Safety News, which he continues to publish.