Playing Russian Roulette with Food Safety Can Be Very Costly

By Nancy Glick, Director of Food and Nutrition Policy

The numbers are staggering. The nation is facing the largest cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, with nearly 23,000 reported (over 10,400 laboratory-confirmed) cases since May 1, 2026, tied to contaminated shredded iceberg lettuce imported from central Mexico. Now traced to 47 states, the outbreak is hitting the Midwest and South hardest, with Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri reporting the largest number of infections.

However, the magnitude of the problem is far greater than the cases reported to date. While the illness caused by the cyclospora parasite is not generally life-threatening, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) classifies cyclosporiasis as a nationally notifiable disease requiring ongoing monitoring. This is because the symptoms of cyclosporiasis – including explosive bowel movements, frequent diarrhea, and vomiting – can last for weeks or months without treatment with antibiotics. And, in young children, older adults, and immunocompromised individuals, cyclosporiasis can be deadly. As of August 2026, there have been over 500 hospitalizations and two reported deaths linked to underlying conditions and severe dehydration.

Yet the most troubling aspect of this outbreak is that the federal food safety system we rely on is falling short. The system was designed to be comprehensive, giving shared responsibility for the safety of our food supply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and CDC. It also involves healthcare providers, hospitals, and laboratories reporting probable cases of foodborne pathogens such as cyclospora to local and state health departments, which in turn voluntarily share the data with the CDC to track, prevent, and stop public health threats.

But in March 2025, the federal government’s investment in the food safety infrastructure started to change. First, USDA terminated two long-standing advisory panels – the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods (NACMCF) and National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection (NACMPI) – indicating to consumers that food safety will not be a priority at USDA in the foreseeable future. The agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) also withdrew a strict rule that would have kept poultry products containing high levels or dangerous strains of Salmonella from being sold.

While USDA was stripping away food safety protections affecting meat and poultry processing, the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) zeroed in on the CDC, laying off roughly 18 percent of the workforce including eight of the 11 members of the CDC laboratory team specializing in cyclospora outbreaks. This was made worse by the dismantling of the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the loss of experts and labs dealing with diseases like cyclosporiasis in facilities that USAID shared with the State Department and CDC. These reductions, according to health experts, have left the agency under-resourced to handle large-scale monitoring and traceback efforts.

The other injustice also occurred in 2025 when CDC scaled back its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), which was created in 1995 to track the top eight pathogens most responsible for the estimated 48 million cases of foodborne illness in the US every year: Campylobacter, Cyclospora, E-coli, Listeria, Salmonella, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia. Designed as a collaborative effort among CDC, state health departments, USDA, and FDA, FoodNet was considered the backbone of America’s foodborne illness surveillance system for 30 years because it gathered data from clinical laboratories at 10 sentinel sites, estimated the burden of foodborne infections, and guided prevention efforts.

Regarding cyclospora specifically, FoodNet captured infection data across roughly 15 percent of the U.S. population – which would have been valuable in addressing the current outbreak. But, as a budget-saving move rationalized by Administration officials as eliminating duplicative CDC programs, the agency restricted federal monitoring under FoodNet to only Salmonella and E. coli. Thus, the burden for tracking cyclospora and the five other pathogens now falls largely to participating state and local health departments– themselves facing localized funding and staff constraints.

When news of FoodNet became public, NCL spoke out about the potential consequences of this action, calling the measure tantamount to playing Russian Roulette with Americans’ health. We were joined by other consumer advocates, food safety experts, public health leaders and state health departments, all of whom stressed that foodborne disease surveillance is the foundation of our food safety system and requires the expertise, resources and coordination of information and data beyond borders that are beyond the ability of states.

Now, with the cyclospora outbreak, we are witnessing the consequences of not viewing foodborne illness surveillance as a national priority. Because investigators are working with incomplete information, it took six weeks from the start of the outbreak around May 1 for CDC and the FDA to link the source of the parasite to iceberg lettuce imported by Taylor Farms de Mexico. Thus, on July 14, CDC issued a Health Alert Network alert notifying clinicians and public health practitioners about the outbreak and followed on July 17 with a food safety alert warning the public not to eat this lettuce. On the same day, Taylor Farms initiated a recall covering shipments to food service operations like Sysco, restaurant chains including Taco Bell locations, and Marketside-brand products at select Walmart stores in at least 27 states.

However, we are not yet out of the woods. CDC and FDA are currently investigating six separate cyclospora outbreaks not yet linked to an identifiable product; it is unclear which cases across the country are connected, and food safety experts caution that multiple sources are likely contributing to the cyclospora surge. It is an object lesson that food safety requires a coordinated national system staffed by specialists in foodborne pathogens, based on collaboration among local, state, and federal agencies.

Underscoring the need for corrective action, recent polls by Gallup and the International Food Information Council reveal that only half of today’s consumers have confidence in federal food regulation (53%) and the overall safety of the food supply (55%). Even more troubling, a Quinnipiac University poll conducted as cyclospora cases passed 20,000 shows that only 12 percent of consumers express a lot of confidence in the nation’s food safety system while 31 percent express some support but another 30 percent say they have no confidence at all, Also of interest, polls show that Americans favor stronger food safety oversight and, in a 2022 survey, 74 percent said it would be worth a 1 to 3 percent increase in the cost of food to pay for added safety measures.

With this consensus as a starting point, NCL is one of the organizations pressing Congress to fully fund CDC’s foodborne illness surveillance and other food safety programs in the upcoming fiscal year. Recently, we joined with the Consumer Federation of America and 25 other organizations and food companies in sending a letter to the House and Senate Subcommittees on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies urging Congressional appropriators to provide a 50 percent ($37 million) increase in funding to maintain FoodNet along with other critical problems needed to solve outbreaks. This would bring total funding to $111 million for FY2027, a small price to pay for Americans to have confidence in the safety of the foods we buy and eat.

If there is any good to come from the cyclospora outbreak, it is that we now know food safety cannot be taken for granted. It is a national priority that all Americans should count on.

Prevention Strategies