How Trump admin cuts have compromised food safety
Since May, more than 11,000 cases of illness caused by the parasite cyclospora have been reported in 41 states. This comes after the Trump administration drastically cut FDA and CDC staff, prompting one expert to call this summer's outbreaks "a national wake-up call."
A tiny microbe has been making a lot of Americans sick. Really sick. Just ask Jessica Mallard. "I wasn't feeling well. The pain in my stomach was, like, unbearable," she said.
The parasite is called cyclospora , It gives you (and I'm sorry to have to say this) debilitating, explosive diarrhea that can last for weeks. Since May, more than 11,000 cases of this miserable illness have been reported in 41 states.
"I'm still fatigued," said Mallard. "Like, I'm really, really weak."
The FDA believes that the biggest outbreak this season, the one affecting nine states so far , came to us aboard contaminated iceberg lettuce from Mexico. That lettuce was shipped nationwide by Taylor Farms , a huge distributor that supplies thousands of groceries and restaurants.
"We've never seen anything like this," said Susan Mayne, an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Public Health, who ran the food-safety department of the Food and Drug Administration from 2015 to 2023. "This is just an astonishingly large outbreak, record-setting outbreak."
Cyclospora comes from human feces. How could that get on the lettuce? "It could be inadequate bathroom facilities, inadequate hand-washing facilities," said Mayne. "Somehow that water is getting contaminated from some other source – sewage, some other source."