CDC confirms Mexican lettuce at Taco Bell linked to multistate cyclospora outbreak

In the heat of mid-July, a microscopic parasite traveling through contaminated irrigation water and across international supply chains arrived, uninvited, on the plates of thousands of Americans. Federal health officials traced a record-breaking cyclospora outbreak — surpassing 4,700 cases across more than thirty states — to shredded iceberg lettuce from a single Mexican supplier served at Taco Bell restaurants in five Midwestern states. The episode is less a story of corporate failure alone than a reminder of how invisibly the vulnerabilities of global food systems can enter the most ordinary