More than 6,500 people in Michigan have been sickened (and at least 100 hospitalized) by cyclospora, a microscopic parasite that’s transmitted by infected food as of Tuesday, July 21. The parasite causes days of explosive diarrhea, nausea, and fatigue, but the outbreak is not limited to Michigan: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it has confirmed over 1,600 cases across the country and suspects upward of 5,100 more. That’s up from 843 in just 10 days.
Cyclosporiasis is difficult to contain under the best of circumstances, says Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. “And this is definitely not the best of circumstances.”
The case counts are growing daily, and the country is on track to have more this year than any previous year. Budget and staffing cuts from the Trump administration have made it harder to respond to the outbreak and get it under control, just as other moves have stymied the response to screwworm, another food safety crisis also gripping the country.
Together, they expose what can happen when federal food safety infrastructure is defunded and stripped away.
Silencing the Early Warning System
The warning signs of the cyclospora outbreak likely took longer to show up after the CDC made the tracking of the parasite optional in 2025 on its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network. FoodNet, as it’s known, is “an ongoing surveillance system, it’s like sentinel surveillance,” Wallace says. The Trump administration has also laid off thousands of food safety workers. The Food and Drug Administration lost over 4,000 employees in recent months, including those working on food safety and scientists testing for bacteria in food. Wired reports that the CDC lost nearly 3,000 jobs since January 2025, including 913 from the Food Safety Inspection Service.
FoodNet research sites around the country used to watch cyclospora, along with other pathogens, and when they saw a blip, it could indicate an outbreak. That would prompt health officials and media outlets to start warning the public to wash and cook vegetables so they could avoid getting sick. “We don’t have that early warning system,” Wallace says. “We had no clue, and then all of a sudden people were getting sick.”
On July 17, the CDC and FDA said that iceberg lettuce sold to Taco Bell stores in a handful of states was almost certainly a source of the outbreak. (Taco Bell pulled some suspect ingredients from its stores before health officials investigated potential links to the outbreak.) There are quite likely other sources given that the FDA and CDC said it was just a subset; Taylor Farms, a supplier of Taco Bell’s lettuce, has begun a voluntary recall.
“It is almost certainly not the whole story,” Wallace cautions. In fact, historically, the norm for cyclospora is to have multiple sources at once, she says.
But private companies aren’t always incentivized to share information with the public on their own or to take costly actions without government intervention.
To narrow down the outbreak sources, the federal government should “connect the dots around the country,” taking data from Michigan and other places and filling in the gaps, Wallace says, but “that’s what’s been cut.”
“A state can come up with a hypothesis,” Wallace adds. But tracing the parasite in other states and connecting it to actual foods “is national work.” The fact that the CDC’s numbers don’t match up with Michigan’s is concerning. “The CDC should be the most updated, but it’s not.”
