A Parasite Outbreak Exploded to 7,000 Cases. The Trump Administration Made It Harder to Find the Source.
Cyclosporiasis cases have jumped nearly thirtyfold over last year — and food-safety experts say federal cuts to disease surveillance have left investigators flying blind.
A Parasite Outbreak Exploded to 7,000 Cases. The Trump Administration Made It Harder to Find the Source.
A microscopic parasite that causes weeks of severe, “explosive” diarrhea has torn through the country this summer, and public health officials still can’t tell Americans what food is making them sick.
The number of cyclosporiasis cases has climbed from around a thousand a week ago to nearly 7,000 confirmed or under investigation across more than 30 states, a caseload the CDC says is roughly twenty-seven times higher than it was at this same point last year.
And a growing chorus of food-safety experts is pointing to the same underlying problem: the Trump administration spent the past year gutting the very surveillance systems built to catch outbreaks like this one.
Cyclosporiasis is caused by Cyclospora cayetanensis, a parasite spread when food or water is contaminated with fecal matter. The illness is rarely fatal, but it is brutal, watery diarrhea, cramping, nausea and fatigue that can drag on for weeks, with about one in eleven patients hospitalized. Michigan has been hit hardest, with the state’s health department reporting more than 3,700 cases against a typical annual count of forty or fifty.
The scale of the outbreak has been circulating widely on social media, where much of the early alarm connected the case counts directly to a specific policy decision:
“The explosive diarrhea-causing cyclosporiasis outbreak has now spread to 31 states, with nearly 7,000 potential cases. Last year, RFK ordered the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network to stop tracking cyclosporiasis.”
That claim gets at something real, even if the full picture is more tangled. In July 2025, the CDC quietly changed how FoodNet works, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, a collaboration between the CDC, USDA, FDA and state health departments that had actively tracked cyclospora since 1997.
Under the new rules, active surveillance became optional for cyclospora and seven other pathogens, leaving mandatory tracking in place only for salmonella and E. coli. Fact-checkers rated the underlying claim true: reporting that had been required for nearly three decades was made voluntary.
Public health officials say the consequences show up in the timeline of this investigation. Barbara Kowalcyk, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security, told The Guardian she believes the funding cuts have hampered the response, explaining that an understaffed system might not get around to interviewing sick patients until six to eight weeks after they fall ill, a devastating delay when investigators are racing against a parasite with a two-week incubation period.
In March 2025, the administration also cut $11.4 billion in grants to state and local health departments; Michigan’s public health labs alone lost $5.5 million.
The consequences are playing out in real time. Weeks into the outbreak, health officials still cannot name a source. Michigan investigators have flagged lettuce and salad greens as a possible culprit after conducting more than a thousand patient interviews, but no grower, supplier or product has been confirmed, and no recall has been issued.
Taco Bell voluntarily pulled some ingredients at select locations as a precaution, though officials stressed no link to the chain has been established. Meanwhile, ordinary people are left to guess:
“The outbreak of diarrhea from cyclosporiasis has been linked to more states while the CDC reports nearly 7,000 cases confirmed or under investigation in the US since May.”
It’s worth being precise about what the cuts did and didn’t do, because the administration’s defenders have seized on the nuance. Some experts, including University of Minnesota epidemiologist Craig Hedberg, note that cyclospora remains a nationally notifiable disease reported through a separate CDC system, and that FoodNet was never designed to detect outbreaks in the first place.
A former agency official told The Washington Post the FoodNet change would have little effect on this specific investigation while acknowledging the cuts do erode the CDC’s ability to track longer-term disease trends.
But even the skeptics concede the broader point: a public health apparatus stripped of staff and funding is slower, blinder and less able to respond when thousands of people suddenly start getting sick.
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield, no partisan critic of Republicans, put it bluntly to CNN: surveillance is the key to early identification, and it isn’t in the country’s interest to cut these programs.
The result is an outbreak that keeps growing while the government tasked with stopping it operates at reduced capacity. The CDC expects cases to keep climbing through August.
Americans are being told to peel their produce, throw away the outer leaves of their lettuce and cook their vegetables, the same advice you’d give a traveler heading somewhere with unreliable food safety. Except this is the United States, and the reason no one can say which salad to avoid is that the people whose job it was to know have been cut to the bone.
Elections have consequences. This summer, for thousands of Americans, one of them is a parasite no one can trace.
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