Trump Cuts Mask True Extent of Cyclospora Outbreaks

While one major multistate Cyclospora outbreak has been making headlines, there are at least six others simmering — and the sources haven’t yet been identified in those cases.

Getting to the bottom of those outbreaks may be more difficult given that infrastructure for tracking cyclosporiasis cases was gutted by the Trump administration last year, an expert told MedPage Today.

The massive outbreak of Cyclospora tied to Taylor Farms’ iceberg lettuce has reached 10,930 reported cases in 17 states, with the bulk of cases in Michigan. This outbreak has resulted in 454 hospitalizations and two deaths.

Six other outbreaks, which have resulted in a total of 270 cases, are under active investigation by FDA’s Coordinated Outbreak Response & Evaluation (CORE) team. In these outbreaks, the source has not yet been identified.

Amid investigations, public health infrastructure is struggling to keep up with, and make sense of, outbreaks as they are happening.

“We’re weeks and weeks and weeks behind, which is unheard of pre-Trump administration,” Becky Smullin Dawson, PhD, MPH, an epidemiologist and professor at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, told MedPage Today.

CDC’s FoodNet, or the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, has been a pillar of the government’s food safety tracking system since 1996. Historically, FoodNet has tracked eight pathogens: Cyclospora, Campylobacter, Listeria, Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia. FoodNet also surveilled Cryptosporidium through 2017.

But last year, the Trump administration removed the reporting requirement for six pathogens — including Cyclospora. As of July 1, 2025, states have only been required to report Salmonella and STEC, leaving cases of the other pathogens underreported.

Dawson noted that since states are no longer required to report Cyclospora cases, it’s harder to tell if reports of “explosive diarrhea” are tied to the ongoing outbreaks or signal other pathogens, like norovirus or rotavirus. Confirmed cases may also not be reported, since hospitals are no longer required to do so.

“I think we’re tempting fate right now. This was a warning that our food safety system isn’t functioning right,” Dawson said. “We’re not able to piece together what’s causing outbreaks and we don’t know if outbreaks are connected.”

She noted that a certain seasonal spike in cyclosporiasis cases is normal since Cyclospora is a summer parasite. There were 717 cases in 2024, 524 in 2023, and 446 in 2022, according to FoodNet data. This year’s cases are more than an order of magnitude greater than past years’ averages.

Public health professionals are heavily relying on data from the Michigan Department of Health rather than federal coordinated efforts, Dawson pointed out. While the Michigan data are excellent, they are missing the bigger picture that federal tracking usually provides.

“We don’t have enough capacity as a public health food safety community to even figure out the answers to the questions that we want answers to,” she said, adding that there’s “no way on earth” to know how many Cyclospora outbreaks or cases there are in the U.S. right now — a big disadvantage from years past.

Prior to the 2025 change in reporting, the federal public health machine would be combing through the data, making sense of both the nitty gritty of each situation and the big picture, Dawson noted. Investigations into Taylor Farms would be further underway. There would have been more coordinating calls between federal health officials and state public health departments. Sharing information with the media would have been more centralized, rather than the current scramble of who first notices changes to data on federal or state websites.

Instead, the public health community and the media are playing catch-up and putting together fragments of information. Dawson said a silver lining of sorts is that cyclosporiasis is not very lethal, like some strains of E. coli or Salmonella, and deaths during this unprecedented spike in cases have been rare.

As of press time, the CDC did not respond to MedPage Today‘s inquiries on whether FoodNet is being utilized in the ongoing Cyclospora outbreaks.