The Latest on the Cyclosporiasis Outbreak

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. So now we turn to our health and climate segment of the week, which we usually do on Tuesdays. As it happens, there was so much health and climate news right now. We will probably do a Tuesday, a Wednesday, and a Thursday one this week. If all our guest invitations pan out, we'll be talking about the wildfires tomorrow. Like can there be a both and solution, like doing more about climate change and changing forest management practices? We hope to talk about that tomorrow.
Then on Thursday, the controversial but little covered confirmation hearing for a new Centers for Disease Control Director, with of course so many public health implications for the country. But for today, it's back to the largest cyclospora outbreak ever recorded in the United States. The government still says it has now been traced by federal investigators to shredded iceberg lettuce from one supplier, Taylor Farms. It served a Taco Bell and sold under the market side label at Walmart. The lettuce is under recall now. But we just had a confusing weekend in which the agency flagged a Taylor Farms lettuce sample as positive for the parasite, then walked it back as a positive.
So is it just that one supplier or is it not? In any case, there have been more than 1600 confirmed cases since May, with another 5,000 plus still being analyzed. Here in New York, the state health department reports roughly 576 of those cases since May, with a sharp jump in New York City in particular, that's as of last week, July 13th. Officials say so far that our numbers are not a major deviation from the norm locally. Why is there a norm? Notably, according to the CDC, New York is not one of the five states in that Taco Bell cluster.
Media reports confirmed by the fact-checking site, Snopes, say the federal government made surveillance for this exact parasite optional under the Trump administration back in 2025, raising the question of whether we've even lost the ability as a country to catch this thing early. Here to help us sort out what we know and what we don't is Marcia Brown, who covers food and agriculture for Politico and has been reporting on this outbreak as it unfolds. Marcia, thanks so much for some time today. Welcome to WNYC.

**Marcia Brown** (2:44)
Thank you so much, Brian. Great to be on the show.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:47)
What happened this weekend? Walk us through the back and forth. People are confused.

**Marcia Brown** (2:51)
It's so confusing. You're right. I think the first thing I want to say is that this back and forth does not mean that the FDA does not still believe that Taylor Farms is one of the sources of this outbreak. They have a lot of evidence, epidemiology, trace back that points to Taylor Farms. I know there is a lot of confusion, but that's certainly still the case. What happened with this test is that the FDA as part of their investigation and their surveillance is they actually increased surveillance of imported lettuce from Mexico. They were testing new batches of lettuce. One of those batches tested positive for cyclospora. That was what the FDA was thinking about when they released that. The reason they did that is because they thought it was important public information that there could be more sources of the outbreak, like a new batch of lettuce.
Then they did more testing and it turned out that was a positive. That created all this confusion about whether Taylor Farms was still part of this outbreak.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:03)
So is it just Taylor Farms?

**Marcia Brown** (4:07)
The FDA's investigation is ongoing.
They have a lot of evidence that points to Taylor Farms for the outbreak in those five states that you mentioned, where this lettuce was served in Taco Bell's, select Taco Bell locations. But the FDA has certainly not said that this is the only source, but this is where their evidence is pointing right now. It's really hard to find cyclospora. It's one of the more difficult foodborne illnesses to detect when you're trying to trace that down.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:41)
How did investigators land on Taylor Farms and a single farm in Central Mexico in the first place?

**Marcia Brown** (4:49)
Yeah. Part of what the FDA does when there's an outbreak like that, they interview people.

**Brian Lehrer** (5:02)
I think we lost. Parasite. Oh, Marcia, we lost you for a second there. You want to start that answer again?

**Marcia Brown** (5:08)
Sure. Sorry about that.
Right. So the FDA, they go to sick people who've been ill and they say, do you remember what you ate? And then they try to find what people ate in common. And a lot of people were eating Taco Bell. What makes this more difficult is that cyclospora has an incubation period of roughly a week. So you're asking people to remember a week ago, two weeks ago what they ate. And that becomes really difficult. But the FDA was able to find that Taco Bell in common with many people eating that. And then they were able to trace that to a single farm in Central Mexico that's owned by Taylor Farms.