Quick Take
The nationwide cyclospora outbreak has sickened thousands, exposing more than a problem with lettuce or one food supplier, writes retired family doctor Jeoffry B. Gordon. Santa Cruz County has had no known cases and contaminated lettuce linked to the outbreak did not come to California — but that should not lull us into complacency. The outbreak, he writes, exposes the consequences of weakened food-safety systems and delayed federal action to trace and contain contamination. He sees food safety as a public responsibility, and he urges readers to demand the resources and oversight needed to keep food safe.
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The story of the ongoing cyclospora epidemic of diarrheal illness is not a tale about a weird parasite, lettuce, Taco Bell or Salinas-based Taylor Farms’ supplier in Mexico.
It is about you.
This outbreak was first recognized on June 14 by the Michigan Department of Public Health and now includes 15,716 laboratory-confirmed cases, 12,000 other suspected patients, almost 400 hospitalizations, and two known deaths in 47 states.
Due to good fortune, none of the contaminated lettuce came to California. Ten recent cases in San Francisco were acquired outside the state, and there were no cases in Santa Cruz County.
Yet you need to know this story if you buy fresh produce or eat restaurant food.
Annually, there have been about 48 million foodborne infections in the United States, with about 3,000 deaths. While washing and cooking everything yourself maximizes protection, note that because cyclospora is “sticky,” washing and even using a vegetable brush might not work to protect you. And this technique is likely ineffective with irregular and large surface areas (like lettuce).
Thus, eating healthy fresh fruits and vegetables could expose you to unanticipated, imperceptible, random and relatively common contaminated foods that you cannot evaluate for yourself.
That is why the dysfunction in the federal agencies responsible to protect our food supply matters. This ongoing outbreak reveals that all of us and our families have ongoing and increasing risk from the food we eat at home and in restaurants.
Your family’s safety and security – and population protection – requires robust public health agencies to always be dependable, well-funded and well-managed. The recent outbreak is an exemplary instance of what happens when a functional regulatory framework gets undermined and neglected by Congress and the executive branch.
The result is substantial preventable harms, illness and ongoing risk to you and your family and friends.
Congress has worried about this issue for decades. That is why, in 2011, it passed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which promotes prevention of foodborne illnesses. It set a goal of 19,200 annual inspections of foreign plants by 2016.
Since then, years of prolonged policy neglect promoted by corporate food industry lobbyists, supercharged by recent policy changes and resource limitations have contributed substantially to this epidemic and your risk.
For instance, in 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made only about 1,100 visits to foreign food plants, finding significant lapses in sanitation in about 80 of them.
The law also required companies and individuals to maintain records to identify where foods are grown, packed, processed or manufactured and report this information to the FDA within 24 hours of a suspected outbreak. Intense food industry lobbying delayed the effective date of this rule for 15 years until January 2026, but last year, after more lobbying, the FDA delayed the implementation of that rule another 30 months, until mid-2028, saying companies needed more time to prepare.
This action, which makes us all more vulnerable to foodborne illness, was strongly endorsed by a heavily lobbied Congress, which by law barred the FDA from using its funding to enforce the rule and urged a revision favoring greater flexibility.
The absence of this traceback capacity definitely delayed identification and containment of the current cyclospora epidemic.
Furthermore, last year, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency task force chaotically laid off as many as 3,500 FDA staff members, including those who supported food inspectors’ travel planning and coordinated with foreign governments on food safety. (Recently, the FDA said that “travel support staff and staff that coordinated with foreign governments have been reinstated.”)
Also, the administration recently eliminated the joint FDA-Department of Agriculture National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which had ongoing responsibility for studying problems that led to infectious outbreaks from foods. In July, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly and dramatically downsized its FOODNET program, the country’s most comprehensive system for tracking foodborne illnesses, eliminating six of the eight pathogens routinely monitored, including cyclospora.
The FDA also reduced by $34 million its funding for states that supported state food inspection and state public health labs.
The current outbreak of cyclospora diarrhea was first suspected on June 15 by Michigan state health officials who, on traceback investigation, found many patients had eaten at Taco Bell. On July 1, July 3 and July 6, they asked the company for its supply chain records. The FDA asked for more records two days later.
But it took until July 13 (one month after the outbreak started) for the FDA to receive all the records it needed to pinpoint lettuce from a Taylor Farms plant in Mexico as a source of the outbreak.
Taylor Farms temporarily shut down the plant on July 18, and issued a voluntary recall of the lettuce on July 19. But FDA inspectors did not arrive in Mexico to inspect the plant until Aug. 15, nearly a month later and two months after the outbreak was identified.
That is far too late.
Adding to public confusion (and distrust of FDA competency), on July 19, after announcing laboratory confirmation of cyclospora in Taylor Farms lettuce, the FDA reported, “FDA laboratory experts re-reviewed the sample results and have concluded that the finding does not represent true amplification and should be considered a false positive. As of July 19, 2026, there are no confirmed positive sample results for product testing.”
In spite of this technical detail, the Taylor Farms recall continued based on strong epidemiologic evidence. Finally, although the contamination of Taco Bell lettuce has been well publicized, many of the FDA’s positive lettuce samples came from (Taylor Farms’) Marketside brand lettuce at Walmart, but there was little publicity of this contaminated source.
This confluence of bad policies, incompetent leadership, self-serving food industry lobbying, impaired agencies, low resources and poor coordination should leave us all worried and anxious.
Where is the next contaminated food going to come from and who will protect you and your family?
This is incompetent governing.
It is time to write and demand change, adequate funding and supportive legal authorities from your elected officials. I suggest calling the director of our local health department to inquire about all food safety activities and call your representatives to ask them to push to rectify these FDA program deficits and cutbacks.
Jeoffry B. Gordon is a retired family doctor and a board member of Doctors for America, an independent, volunteer organization of 40,000 members advocating for quality medical care and patients over profits.
