A Small Parasite, A Real Danger to the Vulnerable Among Us

There's a quiet kind of trust behind every family dinner. When we set out a bowl of salad or slice up fresh fruit for our kids, we're trusting that someone, somewhere, has been watching over that food long before it reached our table. This summer, across dozens of states, that trust has been broken — and families are paying for it with their health.

A parasitic illness called cyclosporiasis is spreading through communities right now, bringing days of severe stomach cramping, exhausting diarrhea, and nausea that can linger for weeks. That alone would be hard enough on any family. But what makes this moment especially painful is knowing it didn't have to happen this way: the very system built to catch an outbreak like this one was quietly dismantled just a year before it began.

Cyclospora cayetanensis spreads through food or water contaminated by human waste, usually traced back to poor sanitation somewhere on a farm. It has shown up before in raspberries, basil, cilantro, and bagged salad mixes — ordinary foods that end up in ordinary kitchens.

Most healthy adults will recover in time. But our most vulnerable neighbors — young children, the elderly, expectant mothers, and anyone already weakened by illness — can suffer for weeks, with symptoms returning in painful waves. There is a treatment, a simple antibiotic, but it only helps if a doctor knows to look for the parasite, and if health officials can spot the outbreak early enough to warn people in time. Both of those depend on a safety net that our government chose to cut.

For almost thirty years, a partnership between the CDC and USDA called FoodNet quietly watched over the foods we all rely on — tracking cyclospora and seven other dangerous pathogens, catching warning signs before they became full outbreaks.

In July 2025, that watch was scaled back to almost nothing. Only two pathogens remained mandatory to track; cyclospora and five others became optional, left to whichever states cared enough to keep looking. That same year, the CDC dissolved its Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria altogether, scattering the very people trained to catch this kind of threat.

A year later, we're living through one of the worst cyclosporiasis outbreaks in recent memory — and the tools we once had to fight it are gone.

Investigators still haven't found where this outbreak began. Officials say they can't yet confirm the cases are connected — but finding that connection is exactly the work the old system was built to do, and it's far harder without it.

Craig Hedberg, of the University of Minnesota's Division of Environmental Health Sciences, has spoken plainly about what's been lost. He rejects the idea that this surveillance was unnecessary duplication, warning that cutting it "normalize[s] the idea that foodborne disease surveillance is expensive and unimportant," when in truth it is "the foundation of our food safety system."

That's the hard truth about the work of caring for one another at scale: it's invisible when it's done well. Nobody notices the quiet, steady labor of a public health system doing its job — until it's gone, and families start getting sick with no one watching anymore.

Investigators are still searching for the source of this outbreak. In the meantime, health officials recommend simple precautions: wash all fresh produce thoroughly, even anything labeled "prewashed." Cook leafy greens for children, expectant mothers, and anyone with a weakened immune system. Consider skipping prewashed bagged salads for now — they've been at the center of past outbreaks.

If someone in your household has watery diarrhea lasting more than a few days, take them to see a doctor and ask specifically about testing for cyclospora — most standard tests won't catch it unless you ask by name.

These are good, sensible steps, and they're worth taking. But they aren't a substitute for what's been lost. Loving our neighbors well means more than washing our own lettuce a little more carefully. It means insisting on a coordinated, funded, always-on system that watches over all of us together — the very system this administration chose to walk away from.