Record Cyclospora Outbreak Linked to FDA, CDC Staff Cuts

Jessica Mallard spent weeks unable to leave her house. The pain in her abdomen was severe enough that she could barely move, and the parasite coursing through her system left her exhausted in a way that lingered long after the acute illness passed. "I'm still fatigued," she said months later. "Like, I'm really, really weak." She was one of more than 11,000 people across 41 states who fell ill with cyclospora since May—a microscopic parasite that causes the kind of debilitating diarrhea that can persist for weeks. It is, by any measure, a record-breaking outbreak.

The FDA traced the largest cluster back to contaminated iceberg lettuce shipped from Mexico by a major distributor that supplies thousands of grocery stores and restaurants nationwide. Cyclospora originates in human feces. The contamination likely occurred through inadequate sanitation at the source—poor bathroom facilities, insufficient hand-washing stations, or water supplies compromised by sewage. Once the parasite reached the lettuce, it traveled across the country in the supply chain, infecting people in their homes.

Almost half of all food-borne illnesses in America originate from fruits and vegetables, largely because we eat them raw. The economic toll is staggering. After a 2006 spinach contamination scare, nearly every spinach grower in the country suffered. That crisis prompted the West Coast farming industry to create the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, a voluntary coalition of producers who commit to safety standards stricter than federal requirements. Members must sanitize irrigation water, test it at multiple points, wear protective equipment, disinfect tools, submit to state inspections at least three times yearly, and use barcodes to trace produce back to specific fields. Jack Vessey, a fourth-generation produce farmer in southern California, understands the stakes. "Any kind of outbreak is detrimental to our industry," he said. Yet even with these precautions in place, outbreaks still occur. As the LGMA's CEO Tim York explained, bacteria exist naturally in outdoor growing environments; the industry can only control so much.

But the real vulnerability lies upstream, in government capacity. Susan Mayne, who directed the FDA's food-safety division from 2015 to 2023 and now teaches at Yale, called this summer's outbreak "astonishingly large" and "record-setting." She also noted that food-safety budgets have been chronically underfunded for decades. What changed recently, however, is the scale and speed of the cuts. During President Trump's second term, the FDA has shed roughly 20 percent of its workforce. The CDC is down 25 percent. The CDC once employed 11 scientists dedicated to tracking food parasites; now it has three. A national advisory committee that counseled the FDA and USDA on preventing microbial contamination was disbanded. Regular meetings with Mexican counterparts to coordinate food-safety improvements were eliminated entirely.

FoodNet, a surveillance program run jointly by the FDA, CDC, and Department of Agriculture, once tracked eight particularly dangerous microbes. It now monitors only two—and cyclospora is not among them. In 2011, Congress passed a food-safety law that included a Traceability Rule requiring companies to maintain detailed supply-chain records for vulnerable foods from field to store shelf. The rule was supposed to take effect this year. "Having seen lettuce tracebacks, that would've been incredibly helpful," Mayne said. But the rule has been delayed until 2028. If another cyclospora outbreak strikes next year, tracing its source will remain nearly impossible unless Congress intervenes.

When asked about these cuts, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services director, told reporters that criticism of the administration's food-safety programs was "invalid." He claimed there had been no cuts to surveillance and that reductions to FoodNet were merely eliminating redundancy. Mayne disagreed directly. "No, it's not accurate," she said. "Clearly there have been cuts." When asked what consumers should do now, she offered practical advice: avoid bagged salads. The processing and packaging of pre-cut greens spreads contamination more widely than whole produce would.

For Mayne, this outbreak is not simply another news cycle. "This is a national wake-up call," she said. The question now is whether anyone is listening. She has spoken with people from both political parties, she noted, and none of them want unsafe food on American tables. The gap between that sentiment and the current state of food-safety infrastructure suggests the real work—the congressional action, the budget restoration, the rebuilding of surveillance capacity—still lies ahead.