In September 2006, bagged baby spinach grown in California’s Salinas Valley sickened over 200 people with E. coli O157:H7 and killed five of them. For a few weeks you could not give spinach away. Twenty years later, almost to the month, FDA closed its investigation into the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history: 12,883 confirmed illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths in 21 states, linked to shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. Inspectors found the parasite in a wastewater tank at the processing plant and in a drainage ditch at a grower, and FDA still cannot say how it got onto the lettuce.

Between those two outbreaks sit two decades of the produce industry deciding, repeatedly, how much food safety it was willing to pay for. Some of those decisions were genuinely good. Some were not. In July I wrote Reap What You Sow, about how the produce lobby helped kill the only federal program testing produce for pathogens, and I am not going to repeat all of that here. What I want to do is be fair about the whole record and then offer the industry a list of things we should be able to agree on. The International Fresh Produce Association meets in Orlando October 13–16 – I must have misplaced my invitation?

 Consider this an agenda without me being there.

A disclosure, as always: Marler Clark represents people sickened in this summer’s Cyclospora outbreak and has filed lawsuits against the Taylor Farms companies. I have been suing produce companies for more than thirty years. Read accordingly.

Who we are talking about

The industry consolidated a few years ago. The Produce Marketing Association and United Fresh merged in 2022 to form the International Fresh Produce Association (IFPA), which is now the dominant voice in Washington. Western Growers represents the farmers in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico who grow most of the country’s lettuce and leafy greens, and it writes the food safety metrics for the California and Arizona Leafy Greens Marketing Agreements (LGMA). On the buy side, FMI – The Food Industry Association and the National Grocers Association speak for the retailers. Behind them are dozens of commodities and regional groups, from the National Onion Association to the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas in Nogales, which represents the importers of Mexican produce.

What they got right

After spinach, the leafy greens industry did something it had never done before. Working through Western Growers, it wrote commodity-specific food safety metrics for growing and harvesting leafy greens, and in 2007 California created the LGMA to put signatories under government audit. It is not perfect. I have sued LGMA members. But it was a real system where there had been none, and after the Yuma and Salinas romaine outbreaks of 2018 through 2020, the LGMA tightened its water and harvest requirements.

The industry also paid for science. PMA put up the seed money for the Center for Produce Safety at UC Davis, which has funded applied produce safety research for nearly two decades. After the 2008 Salmonella Saintpaul fiasco, when tomatoes were blamed for weeks before jalapeños turned out to be the problem, the industry launched the Produce Traceability Initiative. It understood then that the inability to trace is what turns one bad farm into a whole category’s catastrophe. United Fresh supported passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act in 2010.

And this summer, some of the industry said the right things. IFPA called on Congress to strengthen FDA’s Human Foods Program, implement end-to-end traceability and fund state produce safety programs, and it said its members are on the record against continued delays of the Traceability Rule. Taylor Farms posted that it supports traceability legislation. Western Growers CEO Dave Puglia said the industry needs to open its doors wider and show consumers its food safety practices. All of that is good. Now the industry must act on it.

What they got wrong

They killed the trip wire. In 2012 the USDA’s Microbiological Data Program, about $5 million a year to sample produce in commerce for pathogens, was zeroed out. It had triggered 23 produce recalls in 2010 and 2011 alone. Dan Flynn laid the kill at the feet of United Fresh’s lobbyists. Thirteen years later, on July 1, 2025, CDC dropped Cyclospora from FoodNet surveillance. When this summer’s outbreak arrived, nobody was counting.

They fought water standards. The 2015 Produce Safety Rule set numeric limits for generic E. coli in irrigation water. The industry called them unworkable, FDA delayed them, and in 2024 FDA replaced numeric testing with “systems-based” assessments in which testing is required only in certain circumstances. Today no law requires a farm to test its irrigation water or its produce for Cyclospora, and the antimicrobial washes the LGMA requires are validated against generic E. coli, not a parasite that chlorine does not kill.

They cheered the traceability delay. FDA’s Food Traceability Rule was supposed to take effect January 20, 2026. FMI called it overly complex, and when FDA pushed compliance to July 20, 2028, FMI and NGAapplauded. Congress then wrote the delay into the November 2025 appropriations act. IFPA says it opposed the delays, and I take that at face value. But its own 2025 Impact Report touts supporting FDA’s “10 to 1” deregulation effort to reduce FSMA-related burdens. You cannot be for end-to-end traceability and for trimming FSMA at the same time.

They argued with the epidemiologists. On July 15, with cases climbing, IFPA’s chief science officer publicly criticized Michigan health officials for discounting recreational water as a risk factor. The next day CDC and FDA named the lettuce. In August, IFPA filed comments asking CDC to look harder at recreational, occupational and water exposures. Wanting good epidemiology is fine. Floating alternative theories in the middle of the largest outbreak of its kind is not, and it spent credibility the industry will need the next time.

They studied the neighbors instead of regulating them. The 2018 Yuma romaine outbreak was tied to irrigation canal water near a large cattle feedlot. Eight years of studies later, there are still no enforceable setbacks between feedlots and the fields and canals that serve leafy greens.

They took a victory lap on testing. IFPA claims credit for prompting FDA to change its Cyclosporadetection method to cut false positives. Maybe the change was warranted. But when the only laboratory tool you have for a parasite is already weak, any change that produces fewer positives deserves independent scrutiny, not a press release.

Here is the cost of all of that. Puglia told the New York Times that lettuce sales fell near 30 percent this summer, and millions of heads of healthy California lettuce were plowed under. California grew none of the outbreak lettuce. That is what happens when you cannot trace a product in a day: the innocent pay for the guilty. The industry has more reason than I do to fix this.

Where we can find common ground

I said in July that I would rather work with these organizations than shout at them. I meant it. So here are two big asks, a list, and three petitions.

First, ask Congress to unwind the traceability delay. The Safe Food Coalition asked Congress in August to rescind it. IFPA says it supports end-to-end traceability. Taylor Farms says it supports traceability legislation. What stands in the way is a congressional directive and the retailers who lobbied for it. IFPA, Western Growers and the LGMAs should put their names on a letter asking Congress to repeal the enforcement bar and let FDA enforce FSMA 204 on a near-term date, ideally before the 2027 growing season for leafy greens and the other foods on the Food Traceability List. And whatever Congress does, members who grow, pack and buy those foods should comply now. Western Growers has already written its members a guidance document on how. The work is done; the only thing missing is the will.

Second, push forward on water. Cyclospora is a water problem. Both of FDA’s positive samples from Mexico were water. The industry should ask Congress and FDA for the following:

  1. Enforceable, numeric microbial standards for pre-harvest water used on high-risk produce eaten raw, with routine testing. The LGMA already tests; make that the national floor, not the ceiling.
  2. Cyclospora and other parasites added to the testing of growing and processing water at operations producing Food Traceability List commodities, starting in regions with an outbreak history.
  3. Processor wastewater management that keeps outgoing water away from fields, canals and product. FDA found the parasite in a Taylor Farms de Mexico wastewater tank. In 2013, after an earlier Cyclospora outbreak, Taylor Farms said it was testing water at that operation. I have never found a public result.
  4. Research money for a validated kill step or water treatment that works against parasites, including restoring the USDA Cyclospora research projects that were shelved this year.
  5. Enforceable setbacks and watershed monitoring for concentrated animal feeding operations near produce fields and irrigation sources.
  6. The same standards for imports, enforced through the Foreign Supplier Verification Program, which FDA says it will expand before the 2027 season.

And then the rest of the list. None of these should be controversial:

  • Restore Cyclospora and the other dropped pathogens to FoodNet and fund the state and local labs that find outbreaks.
  • Rebuild a produce testing trip wire like the Microbiological Data Program. At roughly $5 million a year, it is the cheapest insurance policy this industry will ever be offered.
  • Fund and support the single Cyclospora genotyping standard FDA and CDC say they are building. IFPA itself has said the genomic tools for this parasite lag far behind those for bacteria. Here is a chance to fix it together.
  • Agree now, before the next outbreak, on a protocol for sharing shipping, sourcing and test data with CDC and FDA within hours. Western Growers’ GreenLink platform already holds years of industry test data; share it.
  • Fund verification of worker sanitation at the farms that supply U.S. buyers: toilets, handwashing, worker health and water, checked by auditors who are not paid to pass.
  • Publish root cause analyses. FDA has promised an Outbreak Investigation Report. Taylor Farms should publish its own water results, from this year and from 2013.
  • Stop supporting FSMA rollbacks. Every “burden” removed this decade was a tool someone needed this summer.

Three petitions, and an invitation

There is one more thing I want from the industry: its help. I have drafted three citizen petitions to FDA, and I have not filed them yet. That is deliberate. Each one grows out of what went wrong this summer and in the outbreaks before it, each one would help the honest grower far more than it would hurt, and each one would carry more weight with FDA if the people who grow, pack and sell produce were on it with me. Here is a taste of what is in them, and why.

Let FDA sample at feedlots implicated in outbreaks. In 2018, FDA found the Yuma outbreak strain in an irrigation canal running past a feedlot of roughly 100,000 head, collected six samples inside the operation, and left. In Salinas in 2019 and 2020, the agency’s best evidence came from a cattle grate, a trough, a fence line and a roadside, places an investigator can stand without anyone’s permission. The first petition asks FDA to use its communicable disease authority under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act, the same authority behind the 1975 rule that still keeps small turtles out of pet stores, to require entry and sampling at an animal feeding operation once the agency has determined in writing that it is implicated in a multistate outbreak. It is deliberately narrow: no seizing animals, no regulating husbandry, no financial records, just a triggered, time-limited right to walk onto ground the agency has already identified as the probable source and take samples. Why should growers care? Because leafy greens farmers have been paying for their neighbors’ manure for twenty years, and right now nobody is allowed to look.

Name the firms implicated in outbreaks. On September 10, FDA closed a fourteen-person E. coli O157:H7 investigation, said for the first time that the food was romaine, and identified no grower, no processor, no brand and no state. Twenty-one months earlier it did the same in an eighty-nine-person romaine outbreak that killed one person. The agency has named farms and processors in these circumstances before; what it lacks is a written standard. The second petition asks FDA to establish by rule that the identity of a firm implicated in an outbreak is not confidential commercial information, to reach the whole supply chain from the field to the restaurant, and to name implicated firms whether or not there is a recall. Why should growers care? Because an unnamed outbreak is a category-wide outbreak. When the agency names one farm, it clears everyone else, and this summer California learned what it costs when nobody is cleared.

Tell people where recalled food went. Since 2008, USDA has published the retail consignee lists in Class I meat and poultry recalls. Congress told FDA in FSMA to consider doing the same. FDA wrote a guidance that does it sometimes. The third petition asks FDA to require it in every Class I food recall, including the restaurants, schools, hospitals and other institutions where bagged salad and shredded lettuce actually end up, and to classify every recall within ten days. FDA’s July recall notice for the Taylor Farms de Mexico lettuce listed customers only as CV, JB, MARK, MKTSD, PK, SUB, SY and TF. Why should the industry care? Because a recall nobody can act on keeps people sick longer and keeps the story in the news longer, and every day it stays there costs the whole category sales.

So here is the invitation. IFPA, Western Growers, the LGMAs, FMI, NGA and any grower, processor or retailer who wants in: email me and I will send you the drafts, tell me what is wrong with them, and help me fix it. If there is a better way to write the feedlot sampling trigger, a legitimate trade secret concern I have not accounted for, or a recall timeline that does not work in the real world, I want to hear it before FDA does. And then sign on. A petition from a plaintiffs’ lawyer is easy for an agency to set aside. A petition from a plaintiffs’ lawyer and the produce industry together is not. I will send the drafts to anyone who asks. My email is bmarler@marlerclark.com.

Twenty years

After spinach, the industry built something. It was imperfect and it was late, but it was real. This summer’s outbreak was bigger, the tools were weaker and the response was slower, and once again the growers who did everything right paid for the one who did not. FDA has sent a letter to industry asking for collaboration before the 2027 growing season. That is a short window.

In ten days, the produce industry will gather in Orlando. I would like to hear someone on that stage say three words: repeal the delay. Then I would like to hear them say “water.” And I would like to see their names next to mine on these three petitions.

About a week ago I posted drafts of two citizen petitions I intend to file with the FDA – one asking for a warning statement on cheese made from unpasteurized milk, and the other asking for a warning statement on raw and lightly cooked sprouts. I asked for comments and corrections. You delivered.

Many of you took the time to wade through more than 20,000 words of regulatory prose and tell me what I got wrong, what I missed, and what I could say better. Citations were fixed, facts were tightened, and arguments were sharpened (and a few were dropped). Some of you agreed with me, some of you did not, and both kinds of comments made the petitions better. Thank you.

The revised drafts, dated October 3, are here:

Because the comments keep coming – and because new outbreaks keep being announced while the drafts are being written – I am extending the time to weigh in through Thursday, October 15, 2026. I will file shortly after that.

Why these petitions are needed

The two petitions involve different foods, but they make the same basic argument and ask for the same modest thing: a sentence on the label. Neither asks FDA to ban anything. Adults who want raw milk cheese or raw sprouts would remain free to buy them. They would simply be told, at the moment they make the choice, what the government already knows.

  • The government already knows the risk. FDA has told children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems not to eat raw sprouts since 1998, and has never withdrawn that advice. On raw milk cheese, FDA’s own science has found that the 60-day aging rule – written in the 1940s and the legal basis for shipping raw milk across state lines as cheese – does not reliably kill the pathogens it was presumed to control. FDA said in 2013 it would reevaluate that rule. It has not finished.
  • The advice has never been on the package. For nearly three decades the warnings have been delivered by press release, talk paper and web page. Almost no one reads those standing in a grocery aisle or at a sandwich counter.
  • The outbreaks have not stopped. FDA counts 52 sprout outbreaks and more than 2,700 illnesses between 1996 and 2020, and two more sprout outbreaks are open right now. On the cheese side, four outbreaks in 31 months – in cheese that complied with the 60-day rule – have sickened 43 people, hospitalized 17 and caused at least six cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome, many of them in children under five.
  • The label is often the only warning that arrives in time. In outbreak after outbreak, most people are sick before anyone announces a recall. Aged cheese sits in refrigerators for months. Cheese cut and wrapped at a deli counter and sprouts tucked into a restaurant sandwich carry no manufacturer’s label at all, which is why both petitions also ask for point-of-sale signs and online disclosures.
  • The precedent is exact. In 1998, after the Odwalla juice outbreak, FDA required a warning on unpasteurized juice. It later required a safe handling statement on shell eggs. Both sit in the same regulation – 21 CFR 101.17 – that these petitions ask FDA to amend. USDA has required safe handling instructions on raw meat and poultry since 1994, after Jack in the Box. The juice warning went from proposal to final rule in about 75 days.

A choice made without the material fact is not really a choice. These petitions are about putting that fact where the decision is made.

Please keep the comments coming

If you have not yet weighed in, please do. If you already have, look at the new drafts and tell me whether I got it right this time. I want to hear from scientists, regulators, public health folks, cheesemakers, sprout growers, retailers, lawyers, and especially from people who think I am wrong. Pointing out an error now is a lot more useful than pointing it out after the petitions are filed.

Call me or email me with your thoughts – bmarler@marlerclark.com or 1-800-884-9840 – any time before October 15.

Thanks again.

Bill

While I was on a plane heading back from Norway, on Friday evening Lena H. Sun of the Washington Post reported that FDA had closed its investigation of the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history: the parasite was in wastewater leaving the Taylor Farms de Mexico plant and in a ditch at a grower that supplied it, and the agency could not say how it got onto the lettuce. Sun also reported two things the notice does not: FDA did not say when the samples were taken, and by the Post’s own analysis of FDA enforcement data, at least 3.1 million pounds of lettuce tied to the operation were recalled, against the previous record for a Cyclosporarecall, about 31,000 pounds of parsley in September 2025. A hundred times the old record, and it took a newspaper to add it up.

That has been the shape of this outbreak since July. The agencies published on a schedule. Sun published when she knew.

The ledger

July 10. Sun asked why nobody could say what food was spreading the parasite. I answered two days later that you cannot trace what you do not count: the official count was 843, and Michigan alone had more than 1,500.

July 14. Sun reported, from two people familiar with the investigation, that investigators were looking at Taco Bell and lettuce. CDC said that day it had found a likely link among cases in four states, and did not say where the people had eaten. The agencies said Taco Bell on July 16.

July 16. The night the agencies said Taco Bell and a single supplier of iceberg lettuce from Mexico, Sun and Rachel Roubein named the supplier: Taylor Farms. FDA’s page named the company on July 17. I wrote that day that the outbreak now had two names on it.

July 24. At five in the morning, Sun reported that CDC had tied four more states to the outbreak. CDC’s investigation page still said five, stamped July 16, and Reuters, picking up her story, could not reach CDC outside business hours. I asked that morning whether the Post was the new CDC. FDA’s advisory caught up later that day.

August 4. At 4:13 in the afternoon the Post named the six states that took the outbreak from nine to fifteen, from a fourth person familiar with the investigation. Every federal page said nine. FDA’s advisory, still titled for a nine-state outbreak, changed on August 5.

August 14. Roubein, Sun and Caitlin Gilbert reported, from four people with knowledge of the matter, that FDA investigators had reached the Taylor Farms plant that week, a month after the agency named the company. The interval was the headline, I borrowed it, and the explanation came from Donald Prater, FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for food, in an interview with the Post.

September 11. Roubein reported, from two people familiar with the matter, that federal officials were about to declare the outbreak over. They did later that day. I learned it from the Post.

What the attributions tell you

Count them. Two individuals familiar with the investigation. A fourth person familiar. Four people with knowledge of the matter. Two people familiar with the matter. They are people inside the investigation telling a reporter what their own agencies’ pages would not say for another day, or another twelve. The information existed every time; it reached the public through a paywall because the federal pages were waiting on a schedule. The reporting is not the problem. Sun and Roubein have been right every time I could check, which is every time.

Congress reads her too. Senator Warren’s August 13 letter to Secretary Kennedy footnotes two of Sun’s stories. Fifteen letters from members of Congress have gone to FDA, CDC, HHS, USDA and Taylor Farms since July. Not one has a published answer, and no committee has noticed a hearing.

The next story is on Capitol Hill

FDA closed its file on Friday and put ten commitments in writing for the 2027 growing season. That is the agencies’ chapter. Congress has not written its own, and the next central Mexico growing season begins this fall. Sun’s next story is in the Agriculture-FDA appropriations subcommittees, the HELP Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Here are the problems and the fixes, as I set them out Saturday on Food Safety News, each with a question.

The traceability rule. The administration pushed compliance from January 2026 to July 2028, and in November 2025 Congress barred FDA from spending a dollar to enforce it before then. Michigan asked Taco Bell three times over six days for a supplier list the rule would have required in a day; FDA had complete records on July 13, and the lettuce shipped through July 16. The fix is to repeal the rider, as eleven consumer and food safety organizations asked in August. The delay was requested by retail, grocery, restaurant and distribution associations, whose own lobbying filings say so. The question: the Senate Appropriations Committee’s report said FDA could not delay past July 2028; the enacted bill says FDA cannot enforce before it. Who put Section 780 in, and why has no senator on that subcommittee asked?

Counting. On July 1, 2025, CDC cut FoodNet from eight pathogens to two, and Cyclospora was dropped. CDC counted 19,883 confirmed cases this season, roughly 7,000 of them never tied to any food. The nominee to run CDC, asked in July whether she would restore the reporting, would not commit. The fix: FoodNet back to eight pathogens, one national number, the illness reportable in every state, and the parasite on the national wastewater panel. The question: what did dropping six pathogens save, and who signed it?

The states. In March 2025 HHS clawed back $11.4 billion from state and local health departments, $8.9 billion of it epidemiology and laboratory money. A court restored it only for the twenty-three states and the District that sued. Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, three of the five original outbreak states, were not among them. The fix is to fund the grants for all fifty; the question is how Ohio counted its share of this outbreak on what was left.

The science. Congress declined to fund two of the three Cyclospora projects at USDA’s Beltsville research center for fiscal 2026, and the parasitologists there were told to relocate or lose their jobs. Kalmia Kniel at the University of Delaware asked USDA four years running for about $10 million to build a water test for this parasite and was turned down. USDA ended the advisory committee that wrote the government’s 2023 report on this parasite, saving $225,000. The fix: fund Beltsville and the Delaware test, rehire the parasitologists, bring the committee back.

The testing program. USDA’s Microbiological Data Program tested about 15,000 produce samples a year for $4.5 million until it was zeroed out in 2012 at the produce industry’s urging. USDA’s own economists price this parasite at $5.3 million a year. The fix is to restore it with the parasite on the panel; it costs less than the disease.

Inspections. Congress set a goal of 19,200 foreign food inspections a year by 2016. In 2025 FDA made about 1,100. Before this summer it had not visited the Guanajuato plant since 2019, and it laid off the staff who plan foreign inspection travel before reinstating them in August after the New York Times asked. The fix: inspect foreign plants on a schedule and fund the inspectors. Susan Mayne, who directed FDA’s food safety center, gave Sun three more on Friday: research on treating agricultural water, a produce safety expert stationed in Mexico, and testing of lettuce before it crosses the border next summer.

Transparency. A petition from STOP Foodborne Illness asking FDA to name every firm in an outbreak has sat at the agency since February; the growers in this one are still unnamed. The genotype comparison between the water and the patients is pending, and Representative Garcia’s July 27 request for Taylor Farms’ records back to 2013 has no public answer. The fix: grant the petition, publish the investigation report and the genotype comparison with a date, and name Cyclospora in the agricultural water rule, whose only numeric standard is for E. coli, a test that cannot find a parasite.

The hearing. The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on this parasite in 1998, and its chairman can issue a subpoena. The Secretary said the outbreak was under control on July 21, when the count was 1,644. For the fifteen offices that wrote, the question is what they have gotten back. For the committees with gavels, it is why the only hearing room this outbreak reached was a confirmation hearing.

Sun has spent a summer telling the public what the government knew before it said so. The sequel is what Congress does about it, and it has a calendar. I asked the beef industry to put me out of business in 2002, and it largely did; I have been asking the lettuce business for nearly thirty years. Ask the appropriators, ask the members who signed the letters, ask the ones who did not, and print the answers next to the dates. The next crop goes in the ground this fall.

Saturday, October 3, 2026

This is the thirteenth Saturday column. Last Saturday’s edition ran under the headline A Raw Milk Cheese Labeled as Aged the Sixty Days the Rule Requires Made Thirteen People Sick; its point was that the recalls were arriving after the outbreaks were already over. This week the government closed the books. On Friday FDA ended its investigation of the largest Cyclospora outbreak ever recorded in this country, 12,883 people sick, and said for the first time where it found the parasite: in a tank of wastewater leaving the Taylor Farms de Mexico plant, and in a drainage ditch at a grower that supplied it. The same afternoon it ended the jalapeño Salmonella outbreak at 488 sick, with a grower traced to a Mexican state and no route of contamination traced at all. The day before, CDC closed the hepatitis A outbreak in frozen blood clams at 37 sick and 30 hospitalized, with the importer never named. Three files, 13,408 people, and not one closing page that says how the pathogen got into the food. The files that stayed open did the opposite of closing. The joint FDA–USDA E. coli investigation went from 25 sick to 38 with no food named, a new Listeria file opened at 11, and CDC’s alfalfa sprout count went from 55 to 76 while FDA’s page for the same outbreak still says 55. Closed without a cause, open without a food.

FDA closed the iceberg lettuce investigation on Friday and, for the first time, said where it found the parasite. The closure page carries the final count, 12,883 confirmed ill, 570 hospitalized and two dead in 21 states, with the last illness beginning August 17, and two sentences the agency had not written before: one positive environmental sample came from a tank that held outgoing wastewater from the Taylor Farms de Mexico processing facility, and the second from a drainage ditch at an iceberg lettuce grower identified in traceback. No lettuce ever tested positive. Genotyping of both samples is complete, and the page does not say whether they match the people. FDA’s own conclusion is that there is not enough evidence to conclusively determine how contamination occurred. Taylor Farms told ABC News the grower is no longer in its supplier program and that the Mexico facility remains closed. I wrote Friday about what FDA found, wrote again after the New York Times put the finding in plain words about what the company has said and has not, and in Food Safety News this morning about what has to happen before the 2027 lettuce is planted. The one thing this week I will credit without qualification is that FDA also put ten commitments in writing for the 2027 growing season, from an outbreak investigation report to laboratory capacity in Mexico to standardized genotyping with CDC, and the Office of Produce Safety deserves the credit. Four other Cyclospora files on FDA’s table are still marked active with their outbreaks ended, 313 people and no food among them, and the season total CDC stopped updating weekly stands at 19,883. Fifteen congressional letters still have no published answer.

The jalapeño outbreak closed the same afternoon, with a grower traced to a state and a cause traced to nobody. FDA’s final page counts 488 sick in 34 states, 65 hospitalized and no deaths, onsets June 16 to August 26. Of 308 people interviewed, 281 ate at a Mexican-style restaurant, Chipotle and QDOBA among them. Traceback found a common grower in Sinaloa that supplies Coast Citrus Distributors; by the time inspectors arrived no jalapeños were left to sample, the environmental samples were negative, and the page says in one sentence that FDA was unable to determine a route or source of contamination. My post on the Salmonella Javiana close is up, and Phyllis Entis wrote up both closures side by side. CDC closed the week’s third file on Thursday: the hepatitis A outbreak in La Serranita frozen blood clams from Ecuador ended at 37 sick, 30 of them hospitalized, in four states, with the New Jersey importer and the New York dealer never named on any federal page. I wrote Monday about whether those clams were illegally imported; New Jersey says yes, and federal law makes it a harder question.

The Graziers raw milk cheese recall reached FDA’s recall page on Tuesday, five days after the company announced it, and it still has no lot codes. The notice lists eleven products, from eight-ounce squares of Monterey jack to 40-pound cheddar blocks, distributed nationwide, and says the investigation has not been narrowed to a specific lot, date code or production date; everything is recalled. The CDC and FDAcounts have not moved since September 25: 13 sick in nine states, eight hospitalized, three with hemolytic uremic syndrome, more than half of them five or younger, onsets July 7 to August 26. Phyllis Entis had it first as the second multistate raw milk cheese outbreak this year and the third since 2024. I wrote Thursday about why thirteen is a floor, why the HUS rate is so high, and the Listeria recall at the same plant thirteen months earlier. Marler Clark represents the family of a child who developed HUS after eating Graziers cheese, and families from last fall’s Twin Sisters Creamery outbreak. The draft citizen petition for a warning statement on raw milk cheese and completion of FDA’s 60-day-rule reevaluation is open for comment through Friday, October 9, and the twenty-five-year outbreak record behind it ran Monday. New York added a footnote Wednesday: Agriculture and Markets found Listeria in raw milk from Big Brook Farm in Oneida County, the farm’s second positive since 2024, and barred sales.

CDC’s alfalfa sprout count went from 55 to 76 on Thursday; FDA’s advisory for the same outbreak still says 55. CDC’s October 1 update adds 21 sick, two hospitalizations and a sixteenth state, Oregon. Onsets now run from May 31 to September 7, sixteen days after the August 22 recall; 64 people have E. coli, nine have Salmonella Agona and three have both, and CDC writes that recalled seed lot SAL2-24JB may be contaminated with multiple pathogens. FDA’s advisory is stamped September 24 and carries 55 sick in fifteen states, and its table row has not moved either. I put the seventy-six in context Thursday: 72 of them were already sick before the public was told anything. The seed kept finding new doors: Todd’s Seeds recalled again, 37,481 units of sprouting seed and mixes containing the lot, a recall that appears in FDA’s enforcement database and nowhere on its recall page. In the other sprout outbreak, EAK Distribution recalled HOME GROWN broccoli sprouting seed sold on Amazon nationwide after FDA found Salmonella in the seed; the same bulk lot went to Evergreen Fresh Sprouts, the grower in the 32-person broccoli sprout outbreak, which has not moved since September 24, Washington still at 24. That is 108 sick across the two sprout outbreaks, and the second time in six weeks that contaminated seed reached home sprouters, which is the argument for the sprout warning label petition, also open for comment through October 9. The twenty-five-year sprout record ran Tuesday.

Eleven open files on FDA’s outbreak table name no food, and together they carry 675 people.The table was re-stamped September 30. The joint FDA–USDA E. coli O157:H7 file, FDA #1421 and FSIS 2026-04, went from 25 sick to 38 in a week and FDA began collecting samples; the product line still reads Not Yet Identified. A new Listeria file, #1415, opened at 11 with traceback only, #1417 went from 40 to 44, and #1379 from 10 to 11, which puts 66 people in three files with Listeria and no food named. On Tuesday I wrote about two calls in twenty-four hours, both culture-confirmed E. coli, both told they are part of a multistate outbreak, both buyers of a meat-and-vegetable sandwich wrap from the same chain in different states; a wrap would explain why one outbreak carries two reference numbers. The firm’s epidemiologists have the records requests out, and I said what the count looked like the next morning and asked the agencies for states, onsets and whether a mixed product is under investigation. CDC’s dashboard, re-dated the same day, lists 33 active multistate investigations, 18 of them Salmonella, down from 38 the week before.

The frozen blueberry recall expanded a third time on Friday, eleven days after CDC declared that outbreak over. Frutas y Hortalizas del Sur of San Carlos, Chile, added Great Value Organic Blueberries and Organic Triple Berry Blend at Walmart in 30 states and Puerto Rico, and Trader Joe’s Organic Mixed Berry Blend in 26 states and the District of Columbia, with best-by dates that run to June 2028. CDC closed the E. coli O145:H28 outbreak September 21 at 17 sick and six hospitalized in Florida and Georgia, no deaths. A suit filed in Pinellas County Circuit Court alleges a Largo woman died June 20 after eating GreenWise blueberries bought at Publix, thirteen days before the first recall; nobody has said whether she is among the seventeen. My post on the expansion is on Food Poison Journal.

Phyllis Entis at eFoodAlert kept the ledger, and the items that matter this week are mostly about what the notices leave out. Gias Foods expanded its bettergoods Lemon Alfredo Fettuccine recall at Walmart to every lot on Thursday, Listeria found by Washington and Florida state sampling, best-by dates into September 2027, no illnesses; the two-lot recall was September 15. New York’s Agriculture and Markets announced a nationwide Listeria recall of Starfish Seafood Cold Smoked Seafood Trio from a Brooklyn distributor that appears on no FDA page (October 1). Coco G’s Snack Foods popcorn, recalled in May for Salmonella, was classified Class I in FDA’s enforcement report on September 29 and appears nowhere else (September 30). G.L. Mezzetta recalled one lot of peperoncini for a pest contaminant ten days after a consumer posted video of what appeared to be a mouse in the jar; the notice never says mouse, and WinCo pulled salsa bean dip trays in eight states that used it. I wrote about the notice that never says so and about thirteen recalls since 2009 where the contaminant was an animal. On the meat side, FSIS recalled 189 pounds of Colombian pork-crackling chips on Friday (October 2), and Star Meat Delivery denied using a fake USDA mark on 167,639 pounds of uninspected meat, saying establishment number 1363 was legitimately reserved for it during the application process; USDA answered that the company never completed the process, that the product surfaced at a South Carolina retailer, and that a retail list would be added to the notice. No FSIS public health alert was issued in September. FDA posted a warning letter to Middlefield Original Cheese Cooperative in Ohio on September 29, Listeria in 14 of 80 environmental swabs after two 2025 recalls; the letter is dated March 6, 207 days earlier.

The nominee to run FDA will not get a vote before the midterms, and the recall count became a campaign line. STAT reported that the Senate HELP Committee left town without scheduling a vote on Dr. Heidi Overton and does not return until November 9; she sat for her hearing September 24 and could not name the office that investigates outbreaks. FDA’s own account on X said the same week that 1,836 recalls in fiscal 2026 is among the lowest totals in a decade and warned readers off the fake news; CBS News and KFF Health News ran the numbers, and I explained Monday why recall counts are a lousy yardstick. Susan Mayne, who ran FDA’s food center for eight years, asked why FDA’s recruiting drive for thirty advisory committees includes no committee on food; the microbiological criteria committee was eliminated last year. House Democrats put their health care agenda on paper with sixteen food bills, one of them about a pathogen. A federal judge in San Francisco extended the pause on USDA’s relocation of about 2,600 employees, Beltsville’s Cyclospora researchers among them, to October 13. Annie Waldman at ProPublica told the story of two little girls, an unlicensed goat dairy and a cease-and-desist letter that let the milk keep selling as pet food; hats off, and the firm has filed suit for both families. And the firm is still hiring an associate and a paralegal.

That’s the week — three outbreaks closed with 13,408 people in them and not one page that says how the pathogen got into the food, eleven files open with 675 people and no food named, 108 sick across two sprout outbreaks with the seed still turning up in new bags, and a raw milk cheese that put three small children into kidney failure recalled nationwide with no lot codes. Two draft petitions are open for comment through Friday, October 9; read them and tell me what I got wrong. Check back next Saturday.

About Bill Marler

William “Bill” Marler has spent more than thirty years as a food safety lawyer and advocate—work that began with the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak and has never really stopped since. In the years that followed, he has represented victims in nearly every major foodborne illness outbreak in the United States. That case, and the movement it launched, is the subject of the book “Poisoned” and the Emmy Award–winning Netflix documentary of the same name. Bill’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker (“A Bug in the System”), the Seattle Times (“30 years after the deadly E. coli outbreak, a Seattle attorney still fights for food safety”), the Washington Post (“He helped make burgers safer. Now he’s fighting food poisoning again”), and many others.

Dozens of times a year, Bill speaks to industry, regulators, and universities across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, China, and Australia about a simple idea: outbreaks are preventable. He has testified before Congress on the Food Safety Modernization Act and teaches food safety at institutions including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He writes regularly about food litigation and food safety at Marler Blog, and in 2009 he founded Food Safety News, which he continues to publish.

On Friday, Christina Jewett, Alice Callahan and Caroline Hopkins Legaspi of the New York Times reported FDA’s finding in the terms it deserved. Inspectors found Cyclospora in water from a tank of outgoing wastewater at the Taylor Farms de Mexico plant that chopped the lettuce, and in sediment from a drainage ditch at an iceberg grower that supplied it, and the Times called that strong new evidence that the summer’s outbreak came from the company’s lettuce. That is the right reading. Jewett, who covers FDA, and Julie Creswell wrote the Times story in August, with Legaspi contributing, that put dates on Michigan’s three requests to Taco Bell for a supplier list and on the rule that would have required an answer in a day. When I think the Times is behind the record, I say so. On Friday it was not, and the three of them deserve the credit.

The Times has the numbers right: nearly 13,000 illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths in twenty-one states, the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak on record. FDA’s final count is 12,883. CDC declared the outbreak over on September 11, and FDA closed its investigation on October 2. I wrote up FDA’s update and its ten commitments for 2027 on Friday and will not repeat them.

What FDA confirmed

FDA’s words, nearly: the positive samples show the parasite was present where the lettuce was grown and processed, and they add to the strong epidemiological data and traceback convergence supporting the link between this outbreak and the recalled shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. In July, Michigan’s interviews and Taco Bell’s supply chain records pointed at one supplier. Taylor Farms recalled the lettuce itself, 236,192 cases sold to Walmart, Subway, Jack in the Box, Taco Bell and Sysco. On August 20, CDC said genotyping showed the parasites from sick people were genetically related to one another. Now the parasite is in the water leaving the plant and the ditch beside the field. The source question is closed. The epidemiology, the traceback, the company’s own recall, the patient genotyping and the environmental samples point to the same place.

What FDA says it cannot yet determine is how the parasite got onto the lettuce, and whether the genotypes of the two environmental samples match the patients. Both have been typed; the comparison is still being analyzed. Those are mechanism questions, not the source question, and the company’s statement runs the two together. The Times drew one more inference: Cyclospora cayetanensis spreads only through human feces, so the parasite in that tank and that ditch came from an infected person on or near those operations.

What Taylor Farms told the Times

The company told the Times that the plant has not reopened since production was suspended in July, that it is working with its research team on enhanced safety protocols from the field to the facility, that the independent farm where one sample was found is no longer in its supplier program, and that trust is earned by what it does. It also emphasized, as the Times put it, FDA’s conclusion that there is not enough evidence to determine where the contamination occurred. It has said before that it spends more than $200 million a year on food safety.

Read the one word. FDA said how. The company said where. Where has an answer: the parasite was found at a grower in its supplier program and in a tank of its own wastewater. Changing how to where turns an open question about mechanism into a closed question about geography, and the company then answers the geography by dropping the grower. The tank is at the plant. The plant is the company’s.

What the company has said since July, and what it has not

The record is short. On July 17 the company said FDA’s tracing pointed to a specific independent farm in Mexico. FDA now says several farms and the plant, and found the parasite at both. In August the company told the Times it runs a fecal indicator testing program covering all of its water sources and that every result was negative. Indicator tests look for bacteria; FDA’s own method for Cyclospora in agricultural water looks for the parasite. The company’s information hub, last modified September 1, says roughly 2,000 of its own samples found no positives, that its water is tested for indicator organisms, and that decisions will wait for its third-party review and the FDA investigation. The FDA investigation has concluded. The page has not moved, and the newsroom lists no release on the outbreak.

Here is what the company has not said, to the Times or to anyone. How the parasite got into a tank of water leaving its own plant. Whether it ever tested that wastewater for the parasite rather than for indicator bacteria. What the independent third-party review it promised in July found, and whether it will be published. What enhanced safety protocols means in practice: a treatment step, a different water source, a worker health program, or all three. When the plant will reopen and on what showing. And an answer to Representative Garcia’s July 27 request for its records back to 2013.

In 2013, after the last Cyclospora outbreak traced to this plant, the company said it would test its water, and FDA reopened the plant on that promise. Thirteen years later I could not find one public result. Enhanced safety protocols is also a sentence. The question for 2027 is whether it stays one.

What I told the Times, and what I have been asking for since July

The Times quoted me on five things. First, there is more to learn from the environmental samples and from patients’ stool, and FDA should publish the genotype comparison with a date attached. Second, before the next growing season the federal government should pay to develop a routine water test for Cyclospora, which does not exist. Kalmia Kniel of the University of Delaware and her colleagues asked USDA for about $10 million to build one four years running and were not funded, as the Times reported in August; USDA says its reviewers chose other projects. Third, enforce the rule requiring supply chain records within twenty-four hours of a product being implicated. Michigan asked Taco Bell on July 1, July 3 and July 6, and FDA had complete records on July 13. The traceability rule that would have required an answer in a day was delayed to July 2028, and Congress then barred FDA from spending a dollar to enforce it before then. The Times itself found that the delay may have slowed the response. Fourth, inspect. FDA had not visited the Doctor Mora plant since 2019; FSMA set a goal of 19,200 foreign inspections a year by 2016, and in 2025 the agency made about 1,100.

Fifth, an answer for the roughly 7,000 confirmed cases this summer that were never tied to any food. CDC counted 19,883 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases with onsets between May 1 and August 31. Of those, 12,883 are in this outbreak. The rest have no name.

None of that is new. Since July I have asked FDA to grant STOP Foodborne Illness’s pending petition and name the growers, asked Congress to unwind the enforcement bar as eleven consumer and food safety organizations did in August, asked for the shelved Beltsville Cyclospora research to be funded, and asked for a hearing. Fifteen congressional letters have gone to FDA, CDC, HHS, USDA and Taylor Farms since July. None has a published answer, and no committee has noticed a hearing. Jim Gorny, who retired from FDA in 2024, told the Times that without knowing how the lettuce was contaminated, the new measures are the same strategies tried again in hope of a different result; Frank Yiannas, who ran food policy at FDA from 2018 to 2023, hopes this summer becomes a catalyst. I would put it less gently. The parasite was found in the water. The company has a page that says it is waiting for FDA. FDA has a list of ten commitments and one date. Congress has a rider.

Marler Clark represents about 500 people sickened in this outbreak and has filed suits in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois.

Three reporters put FDA’s finding, the company’s answer and the open questions in one place on Friday, which is more than the company’s website has done since September 1 and more than any committee of Congress has done since July. The next thing worth printing is the genotype comparison, and after that the investigation report that says what the water looked like. Jewett, Callahan and Legaspi will read both. The company should assume so.

Three questions keep arriving in my inbox: what did industry say, did Congress ever get an answer, and what are the final numbers. Here are the short answers, then the record behind each. Taylor Farms gave a reporter a statement and changed nothing on its own website. The largest produce association answered FDA’s letter to industry with a letter of its own asking FDA to do the root cause work. Fifteen letters from members of Congress have produced no published answer and no hearing. The federal numbers are final. The state numbers are not, and nobody has said they are.

What Taylor Farms said, and where it said it

When FDA closed its investigation on October 2 and reported the parasite in a tank of outgoing wastewater at the Taylor Farms de Mexico plant and in a drainage ditch at a traceback grower, a Taylor Fresh Foods spokesperson told ABC News that the central Mexico facility remains closed while the company works with its research team on enhanced safety protocols, that the independent grower where a positive sample was found is no longer part of its supplier program, and that, as FDA noted, there is not enough evidence to determine how contamination occurred. The company said it remains concerned for the people and families affected. I wrote up what FDA found here.

Read it for what it does not address. The grower with the positive ditch is out. The company’s own plant, where the positive wastewater tank sits, gets the phrase enhanced safety protocols and nothing more specific. The plant has been closed since July 18.

Then go to the company’s Cyclospora information hub. As of this morning it carries a September 1 modification date. It says twice that according to FDA there are no confirmed positive sample results for product testing as of August 27, 2026. It says that confirming a specific product requires a positive laboratory test of the product, that the company’s own testing of roughly 2,000 samples in central Mexico since May returned zero positives, and that water sources are tested for indicator organisms. It says decisions about the future will be based on what the independent third-party review and the FDA investigation find. The FDA investigation has now found, and the page has not moved. The company’s newsroom lists no release on the outbreak at all; the most recent entry is a June 30 scholarship announcement.

In fairness, FDA’s two positives were environmental samples, not product, so the product-testing sentence is still technically true. It is no longer the point; the spokesperson did not repeat it on October 2. And the line that water sources are tested for indicator organisms now sits next to a federal finding of the parasite itself in water leaving the plant.

What the trade associations said

FDA’s letter to industry, dated September 11 and posted September 16, asked every link in the supply chain to develop new science-based practices against this parasite. On September 16, the International Fresh Produce Association sent its own letter to Acting Commissioner Diamantas asking for clearer communication, a transparent root cause analysis, and FDA support for research on traceability in the produce industry. Two letters crossed in the mail, each asking the other side to do the work. IFPA’s Cathy Burns said separately that the association supports putting the Food Traceability Rule into effect without further delay, while wanting workable standards, and IFPA had earlier proposed an FDA-led public-private task force to run the root cause analysis once the investigation closed. Credit where it is owed: that traceability position is the right one, and it puts the growers on the opposite side from the retail associations whose lobbying filings asked Congress for the delay.

IFPA closed its own Cyclospora page on September 14, which I wrote about at the time. As of this morning I can find nothing from IFPA, Western Growers, the leafy greens marketing agreements or Taco Bell on FDA’s October 2 close. Give it until Monday.

Fifteen letters, zero answers, one hearing room

On September 5 I listed thirteen letters from members of the House and Senate, eight of them with deadlines that had already passed. Representative Dingell wrote to USDA on September 14 about the shelved Cyclosporaresearch at Beltsville, and Representative DeLauro wrote to Secretary Rollins on September 17 with twenty-four colleagues from both chambers on the same subject. That is fifteen. I updated the list on September 16 and checked again this week. I cannot find a published answer to any of the fifteen. Not to Representative Garcia’s request for facility records going back to 2013, not to Senator Blumenthal’s two July 30 letters as ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, not to Senator Warren’s nine questions due August 27.

The official answers that exist were given to reporters. HHS’s press secretary told The Hill on August 13 that the response was guided by science and that outbreak investigators were untouched by the staffing cuts, which I recorded then. A USDA spokesperson told Fox stations in late August that Congress did not fund two of the three Beltsville Cyclospora projects for fiscal 2026 and that the third is moving to Iowa. FDA told the New York Times that laid-off travel and foreign-coordination staff had been reinstated. FDA’s October 2 update is the first substantive public answer to any records question Congress asked, and it was addressed to nobody.

No committee has noticed a hearing. The one hearing room this outbreak entered was the Senate HELP Committee’s September 24 confirmation hearing for Dr. Heidi Overton, where it came up in questions and, as Food Safety Magazine reported, the nominee could not identify the FDA office that runs outbreak investigations. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on this parasite in imported raspberries in July 1998. Its chairman can issue a subpoena. Its ranking member has already written twice.

The count: the federal numbers are final, the state numbers are not

The outbreak FDA and CDC attribute to the recalled lettuce closed at 12,883 illnesses in 21 states, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths, with the last illness beginning August 17. CDC declared it over on September 11. FDA closed its investigation October 2.

The season count is the number to remember. CDC’s case data page reported 19,883 laboratory-confirmed cases acquired in the United States with onsets between May 1 and August 31, 1,064 hospitalizations, two deaths and 49 states plus the District of Columbia as of its September 15 update, against 1,180 confirmed cases for the same stretch of 2025. Another 9,765 confirmed cases were still being sorted into domestic or travel, and CDC said it was aware of 6,594 more. That is 36,242 people the agency knows about. CDC stopped weekly updates after September 15.

Subtract the outbreak from the season and 7,000 confirmed cases have no food named. FDA’s outbreak table still carries four Cyclospora files, 313 people in all, where the outbreak has ended and no food was ever identified.

The states are a different series, and they are not done. The last time I added up all fifty, on September 3, forty-one states published a 2026 count and those summed to 33,457; Food Safety News carried the tally at 33,548 on September 12. Michigan alone reported 14,718 cases and 366 hospitalizations as of September 3, and its page now says it updates on the first Thursday of each month, which makes October 1 the first new number since the season closed. Indiana closed its count at 2,104 pending a formal close. Nearly every other state stopped updating in late August or September, and none has posted a number it calls final. I will publish a fifty-state closing table, each state’s last posted count and date beside CDC’s, as soon as Michigan’s October figure is in hand.

Marler Clark represents hundreds of people sickened in this outbreak and has filed suits in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois.

Everything that could be closed has been closed. The season closed August 31. CDC closed the outbreak September 11. FDA closed the investigation October 2. The company’s page closed on August 27 and has not reopened. The fifteen letters never opened at all. Two people are dead, 570 went to a hospital in the one outbreak that has a name, 7,000 confirmed cases have none, and the nearest thing to an answer under oath is a confirmation hearing where the parasite was a question. One subpoena would change that.

On October 2, 2026, FDA closed its investigation of the Cyclospora outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. The final count is 12,883 illnesses in 21 states, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths, with the last illness beginning on August 17. CDC declared the outbreak over on September 11. Today’s update is the first time FDA has said what its inspectors found in Mexico, and it is the first laboratory finding from the growing and processing environment in this outbreak.

FDA’s traceback identified several farms and one processing facility in Mexico that supplied the recalled lettuce. Investigators inspected and sampled multiple growers and the plant in coordination with Mexican officials, collecting water, soil, sediment and lettuce. Two samples tested positive for Cyclospora. One came from a tank holding outgoing wastewater at the Taylor Farms de Mexico processing facility. The other came from a drainage ditch at an iceberg lettuce grower identified in the traceback. No lettuce sample tested positive. The only product positive ever announced, a border sample on July 18, was withdrawn as a false positive the next day.

FDA also said what the two positives do and do not show, and it deserves credit for saying it plainly. They show the parasite was present where the lettuce was grown and processed, and they add to the epidemiology and the traceback that pointed at this lettuce in July. They do not show how the contamination happened. FDA says there is not enough evidence to determine that. Genotyping of both samples is complete, and FDA is still working out how those results relate to the genotyping of specimens from sick people.

The last time FDA sampled this operation

In 2013, after a Cyclospora outbreak that sickened 631 people in 25 states, FDA and five Mexican agencies conducted an environmental assessment at Taylor Farms de Mexico in Guanajuato. By my reading of that assessment, about 835 samples of lettuce, water and worker stool were tested and none was positive. The one sample that could not be read was recycled wash water from inside the plant, too turbid for the filtration method. FDA could not determine how or where the parasite got into the product. Taylor Farms said it would test its water. Thirteen years later I could not find one public result. I have written about the two federal documents and about this company’s outbreak and recall record since 2009.

Put the two investigations side by side. In 2013, the one sample the method could not read was water inside the plant. In 2026, one of the two positives was water leaving the plant, and the other was water beside a field. FDA moved its sampling upstream this time, from the plant to the growers, which it announced on August 20, and a field is where a waterborne parasite gets onto lettuce. A positive in a wastewater tank is water that has already washed lettuce. It does not tell you whether the parasite arrived on the leaves or in the building. It tells you it went through the building.

Two statements from this summer belong next to that. On July 17, Taylor Farms said FDA’s tracing indicated that a specific independent farm in Mexico was responsible. FDA now says its traceback identified several farms and the processing facility, and the positives came from a grower and from the plant’s own wastewater. In August the company told the New York Times that it runs a fecal indicator testing program covering all of its water sources and that every test had been negative. Indicator tests look for bacteria, not for this parasite. FDA’s own method for Cyclospora in agricultural water looks for the parasite itself, and a sample reported positive for Cyclospora can only come from a test that does. Negative indicator results on incoming water and a positive parasite result on outgoing water are not in conflict. They are two different questions, and only one of them is the right question.

The sentence everyone is waiting for

On August 20, CDC said genotyping showed the parasites from sick people were genetically related to one another, which closed off the argument that this summer was unrelated cyclosporiasis piling up at once. It did not tie anyone to the lettuce. Today FDA says the two environmental samples have been genotyped and it is still analyzing how they relate to the clinical results. That is the comparison that matters. If the parasite in the wastewater tank and the ditch matches the parasite in the patients, the loop that 2013 never closed is closed. If it does not match, that is worth knowing too. FDA should say which, and say when it will say.

What FDA says comes next

On September 11, the day CDC closed the outbreak, FDA posted a page titled Post-Outbreak Response Activities. It lists a meeting with Mexican officials the week of September 8 about a prevention framework, a continuing root-cause investigation, a letter to industry, and a promise to fold lessons learned into the Cyclospora Prevention, Response and Research Action Plan in the coming months. Today’s update says that page will also carry prevention activities planned before the 2027 growing season. The letter, signed September 11 by Donald Prater, the acting deputy commissioner for food, reminds growers, packers, importers and retailers of rules already on the books and asks every link in the supply chain to develop new science-based practices against this parasite. The Action Plan it points to was written in 2021, and its page was last updated on June 30, 2023. It opens by describing roughly 3,000 domestically acquired cases over three years. CDC confirmed 19,883 this season as of its September 15 update.

Of those 19,883, 12,883 are in this outbreak. Roughly 7,000 confirmed cases have no food named, and FDA’s own outbreak table still carries four Cyclospora files, 313 people in all, where the outbreak has ended and no food was ever identified. The National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which FDA charged in 2021 with the research questions the letter now hands to industry, delivered its Cyclospora report in 2023 and was terminated in 2025.

Before the first head of lettuce goes in the ground for 2027

Say whether the genotypes match. The environmental results exist. Compare them to the patients, publish the answer, and put a date on it.

Publish the root-cause findings. Which farms, how the water was used and treated, what the soil and sediment showed, and what was found at the plant. FDA published the 2013 assessment. It should publish this one.

Test water for the parasite, not for a stand-in. FDA has a method for Cyclospora in agricultural water. The pre-harvest water rule names no parasite. Name it, and say what a grower is supposed to do with a positive.

Records in twenty-four hours. Michigan asked Taco Bell for its supplier list on July 1, July 3 and July 6, and FDA had complete records on July 13. The traceability rule that would have required an answer in a day was delayed to 2028, and Congress then barred FDA from spending a dollar to enforce it before then. FDA can ask Congress to unwind that, and the part of industry that is already compliant can ask with it.

Inspect on a schedule, not after an outbreak. Before this summer, as the Times reported, FDA had last visited the Doctor Mora plant in 2019. A grower that ships to thirty-one states should expect a visit more often than once in seven years.

Say what the 7,000 are. If the clusters cannot be solved, say that, and say what would have been needed to solve them.

Marler Clark represents hundreds of people sickened in this outbreak and has filed suits in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Illinois.

FDA found the parasite in the water this time. In 2013 it could not read the water, and nothing public ever came of the promise to test it. The difference between those two years is a sample result and a page that says what it means. The difference between this year and next will be whether anybody is required to do anything about it before the 2027 lettuce is planted.

I am somewhere over Greenland on my way home.

On Friday, Dr. Donna Garren, who directs the Office of Produce Safety at FDA, sent her stakeholder list a short email with four FDA links on this summer’s Cyclospora outbreaks, and asked readers to look at one in particular: a list of ten things FDA commits to doing before the 2027 growing and harvesting season. She wrote that she wants stakeholders to know the agency’s attention to Cyclospora will continue and that FDA will stay “open and transparent” about the work. Donna Garren is the best FDA has on produce. I take her at her word, and as far as I can find, this is the first numbered list of commitments the agency has put in writing on this outbreak.

Cyclospora cayetanensis is a parasite that reaches food through water or hands contaminated with human feces. It cannot be reliably washed off produce, it cannot be cultured in a laboratory, and it shows up in this country every summer, mostly on fresh produce.

The outbreak the list is answering

It was the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak on record: 12,883 confirmed illnesses in 21 states, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths, both in Michigan, tied to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico and served, among other places, at Taco Bell. CDC declared it over on September 11. FDA says its own investigation continues, and as of the agency’s September 11 update the samples its inspectors collected at the growers and the processing plant in Mexico were still pending analysis. The last weekly national count CDC published, on September 15, was 19,883 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases between May 1 and August 31, which leaves roughly 7,000 confirmed cases this summer with no food named. FDA’s own outbreak table still carries four Cyclospora investigations with no source, as I wrote this morning.

The ten items

Here is what FDA says it is committed to doing before next season, in my words rather than the agency’s. The full text is on the post-outbreak response page.

  1. An Outbreak Investigation Report summarizing the investigation, the factors that may have contributed to contamination of the imported, shredded iceberg lettuce, and recommendations to prevent the next one.
  2. More surveillance of the commodities historically associated with Cyclospora, and of how they are produced, to understand contamination levels and which sampling strategies work.
  3. More outreach, at home and abroad, on current and prospective food safety requirements, naming the Produce Safety Rule, the Preventive Controls rule and the Food Traceability Rule.
  4. Laboratory capacity in Mexico to collect, analyze and process Cyclospora samples in-country, to cut the time to a final result.
  5. New data sources and tools, including weather events, to monitor the environmental conditions that may spread Cyclospora.
  6. Education and training for Mexico’s fresh produce industry, with Mexico’s Ministry of Agriculture, COFEPRIS and SENASICA.
  7. Expert panels on worker health and hygiene, on water and wastewater monitoring, and on the gaps in growing and processing practices for certain produce.
  8. A single, replicable Cyclospora genotyping standard, developed with CDC, for the federal government, partner nations and industry.
  9. More Foreign Supplier Verification Program inspections, so that importers treat Cyclospora as a hazard in their hazard analyses and supplier verification.
  10. Lessons from the investigation and any root cause analysis folded into an updated Cyclospora Prevention, Response and Research Action Plan.

What is good about it

A fair amount. The investigation report, item one, is the document that will say what the inspectors found in those fields and in that plant, and it is the one I will be waiting for. Item four addresses a real problem: FDA’s own wording is that in-country laboratory capacity would reduce the time needed to get final analyses, which tells you that time was lost this summer between a field in Mexico and a laboratory result. Item eight matters because genotyping did real work this summer: on August 20 CDC said the parasites from sick people were genetically related to one another, and a shared, replicable method is what lets the next outbreak be tied together in weeks rather than months.

Item nine is the one with teeth. A Foreign Supplier Verification Program inspection is an inspection of the importer whose name is on the entry, and an importer that fails it can be placed on import alert. It is the only item on the list where somebody gets inspected rather than educated, surveyed or convened, and it is an authority Congress left alone. The action plan in item ten dates to 2021 and has been updated at least twice since; a third update is welcome, but a plan is not what was missing this summer.

Now read item three

FDA says it will do more outreach on current and prospective food safety requirements, and it names three: the Produce Safety Rule, the Preventive Controls rule and the Food Traceability Rule. Two of those are current. The third is prospective for a reason that has nothing to do with Dr. Garren’s office. The Food Traceability Rule was finished in November 2022 with a compliance date of January 20, 2026. In March 2025 the administration pushed compliance to July 20, 2028, and in November 2025 Congress wrote the delay into law: Section 780 of the bill that ended the shutdown bars FDA from spending appropriated money to administer or enforce the rule before that date. Leafy greens, fresh and fresh-cut, are on the Food Traceability List. Shredded iceberg lettuce is exactly the product the rule was written for.

I have written the history of that rule and will not repeat all of it. The short version is that FDA’s traceback did not converge on a single supplier until July 17, more than a month after the first illness onset CDC later counted, and the recall drew a line around a company rather than around the product in front of a shopper. The rule that requires a shipper to produce lot-level records within twenty-four hours is the rule that shortens that interval. It is the one rule on Dr. Garren’s list that her office may teach but may not enforce. Outreach is what the appropriations rider leaves the agency free to spend on.

That is not a criticism of the Office of Produce Safety. It is the rider showing up in the office’s to-do list, and the people who wrote item three know it better than I do.

What is not on the list

No item carries a date beyond “prior to the 2027 growing season.” Nothing names the growers in Mexico whose fields FDA inspected, which is the subject of the citizen petition STOP Foodborne Illness has pending before the agency. Nothing addresses the roughly 7,000 confirmed cases this summer with no food named, or the four clusters FDA still lists without a source. And nothing says when the samples collected in Mexico will be reported. Item one is where those answers belong, and it is the item I will hold the agency to.

Two things I would say

To the Office of Produce Safety: thank you for writing it down. A numbered list with a season attached is something a stakeholder can hold up a year from now and check, and that is what open and transparent looks like in practice. When the investigation report comes, say what the water looked like and what the samples showed, even if the answer is that nothing was found.

To Congress: members sent more than a dozen letters this summer asking FDA, CDC and HHS what went wrong. One answer is sitting in your own appropriations bill. Eleven consumer and food safety organizations asked you in August not to delay the traceability rule any further. The people who wrote item three cannot enforce the rule that would have found this lettuce faster, because you told them they could not. If you want the Office of Produce Safety to do more than educate before the 2027 season, give it back the authority to enforce the Food Traceability Rule, and fund it.

The CDC announced today that the multistate Salmonella Javiana outbreak linked to jalapeño peppers from Sinaloa, Mexico, distributed by Coast Citrus Distributors, is over, and the FDA has closed its investigation. The final count is 488 sick people in 34 states. Sixty-five people were hospitalized – 15% of the 434 with information available. No deaths were reported. Illnesses started on dates ranging from June 16, 2026, to August 26, 2026.

That is up from 431 sick in 32 states and 57 hospitalizations at the August 19 update, and from 345 sick in 27 states when the outbreak was first announced on August 5. As CDC always notes, the true number of sick people was likely much higher, since many people recover without seeing a doctor and are never tested for Salmonella.

Chipotle and QDOBA

State and local health officials interviewed 308 sick people. Of those, 281 (91%) reported eating at a Mexican-style restaurant before becoming ill, including Chipotle Mexican Grill and QDOBA, with meal dates from June 14 to July 29, 2026. Investigators identified 36 illness clusters – at 31 Chipotle locations in 7 states and 5 QDOBA locations in 2 states. Commonly reported ingredients included jalapeño, red onion, cilantro, and avocado.

According to the FDA, both chains received jalapeños imported by Coast Citrus Distributors from Sinaloa. Chipotle switched its jalapeño supplier for impacted stores beginning July 20, 2026, and QDOBA stopped using jalapeños in its stores on July 28, 2026. FDA’s traceback, based on where sick people ate, identified a common grower in Sinaloa that supplies Coast Citrus as the likely source. Whole genome sequencing showed the bacteria from sick people were closely related genetically.

What FDA did not find is as telling as what it did. FDA investigators inspected a common Mexican distributor identified through traceback, observing operations, reviewing records, and collecting samples. By the time they got there, no jalapeños were left to sample. All of the environmental samples came back negative for Salmonella, and FDA says it was unable to determine a route or source of contamination.

The Recalls

Coast Citrus Distributors initiated a limited recall on July 22, 2026, of jalapeños packed in bulk generic Coast Tropical packaging, and on August 5 agreed to recall the remaining jalapeños implicated in the outbreak. The firm is no longer importing from the common grower. Downstream recalls followed, as listed on FDA’s Major Product Recalls page:

– NatureBest Precut & Produce (August 8) – NatureBest and H-E-B pico de gallo, stuffed mushrooms, and soup mix sold in Texas and Louisiana.

– Taylor Fresh Foods (August 9) – dips, salsa, guacamole and other products sold under Trader Joe’s, Freshness Guaranteed and other labels, with stores including Hannaford, Kroger, Stop and Shop, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, and Whole Foods.

– Salata (August 11) – Jalapeño Avocado Dressing.

– Whole Foods Market (August 12) – select salsas, guacamole, pico de gallo and prepared foods in 12 states.

– Dairyland Produce (August 12) – 5-pound jalapeño packs.

USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service also issued a public health alert on August 8 for meat and poultry products – salads, bowls, and burritos – made with the recalled jalapeños. The FSIS product list includes products sold at Walmart, Kroger, H-E-B and others. FSIS reported no confirmed illnesses tied to those specific products.

The fresh jalapeños themselves are long past shelf life, but FDA warns that some of the downstream recalled products have longer shelf lives. Consumers should check their homes and throw out recalled products or return them for a refund.

Who Got Sick

Those sickened ranged in age from under 1 to 85 years, with a median age of 31; 61% were female. WGS showed no predicted antimicrobial resistance in 485 of the isolates, but bacteria from three people were predicted to be resistant to one or more antibiotics, including ceftriaxone and azithromycin, and one also showed predicted nonsusceptibility to ciprofloxacin.

Jalapeños – Again

For those of us with long memories, this is not the first time Mexican jalapeños have sickened people across the country. In 2008, the Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak – first blamed on tomatoes – was ultimately traced to jalapeño and serrano peppers from Mexico after more than 1,400 people fell ill. Eighteen years later, nearly 500 people got sick, investigators arrived after the peppers were gone, and FDA could not say how the contamination happened. We are still learning about contaminated produce eaten raw, on burrito bowls and in salsa, from sick people rather than from testing before it ships.

The outbreak may be over, but for the 65 people hospitalized and the hundreds more who were sick for a week or more, the effects are not. Salmonella can lead to complications including reactive arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome long after the diarrhea stops.

See the CDC’s outbreak notice and final investigation update, the FDA’s outbreak investigation, and the FSIS public health alert for more.

Salmonella

Salmonella sickens more than a million Americans every year and is the leading cause of hospitalizations and deaths among foodborne bacteria. Its reach is remarkable—it turns up in produce, poultry, pantry staples, and pet food alike. Marler Clark, The Food Safety Law Firm, is the nation’s leading firm representing victims of Salmonella outbreaks. Our Salmonella lawyers have represented thousands of victims in the only U.S. law practice devoted exclusively to foodborne illness, which has recovered more than $850 million for victims and families nationwide. We have tied Salmonella outbreaks to cantaloupe, tomatoes, ground turkey, salami, sprouts, cereal, peanut butter, and restaurant meals, and we have brought cases against Cargill, ConAgra, Peanut Corporation of America, Sheetz, Taco Bell, Subway, and Wal-Mart. The Peanut Corporation of America outbreak ended in federal criminal convictions, with the company’s owner sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison. We are also pressing the federal government to treat Salmonella as an adulterant on raw chicken, so that contaminated poultry can be kept off store shelves the way dangerous E. coli already is.

If you or a family member became ill with a Salmonella infection—including lasting complications such as reactive arthritis or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)—after eating contaminated food, contact the Marler Clark Salmonella attorneys for a free case evaluation.

FAQ

What is Salmonella?

Salmonella is a group of bacteria behind one of the most common—and most deadly—foodborne infections in the United States, sickening more than a million people a year. Symptoms usually begin between 6 hours and 6 days after eating contaminated food and include diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps that last four to seven days.

What foods cause Salmonella outbreaks?

Poultry, eggs, ground beef, produce, peanut butter, flour, and even pet food have all caused outbreaks. Salmonella can survive for months in dry, low-moisture foods.

Can a Salmonella infection cause long-term problems?

Yes. Some victims develop reactive arthritis—joint pain and swelling that can persist for months—or irritable bowel syndrome after the initial illness resolves.

Who is most at risk?

Young children, adults over 65, and people with weakened immune systems are the most likely to be hospitalized or to suffer severe, invasive infection.

Can I sue for a Salmonella infection?

If your illness is linked to a contaminated product or a recognized outbreak, you may have a claim against those in the chain of distribution. A stool culture matching the outbreak strain is powerful evidence.

Additional Resources:

First, a tip of the hat. Helena Bottemiller Evich of Food Fix sent this my way, and if you are not reading Helena on food policy, you should be. The document is an 84-page memo to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries from the caucus’s Cost-of-Living Healthcare Working Group, dated September 1, 2026, and posted by Politico. It is a roadmap for what Democrats say they would move in the first 100 hours, the first 100 days, and the first year of the 120th Congress if they win the House. The working group says it held 93 meetings with 139 members and 145 outside groups to build it.

Most of the memo is about things I do not do for a living — Medicare Advantage, pharmacy benefit managers, drug patents, medical debt, nurse staffing. I will leave those to others. But Section VII, titled “Reclaiming MAHA and Protecting American Families,” is about food, and I read every word of it and of the bill summaries behind it. What follows is a quick tour of everything food safety and nutrition related in the memo, and then the part that is in my wheelhouse: pathogens — what is there, and what is not.

The framing is right. The memo says Americans’ worries about chronic disease and food safety are legitimate and long overdue for a serious legislative response, and it cites polling showing 75 percent of Americans want stricter food additive rules. It argues that HHS Secretary Kennedy and the administration have used those worries to spread vaccine misinformation while rolling back the rules that protect our food, air and water. It names “the current Cyclospora outbreak” as a consequence. And in its opening pages it faults the administration for eliminating programs “we rely on to prevent, detect, and contain disease outbreaks.” I agree with every one of those sentences. Hold onto that last one; I will come back to it.

Everything food- and nutrition-related in the memo. By my count there are sixteen bills or policy ideas in Section VII, sorted by when the working group wants them moved:

First 100 hours

  • H.R. 7601, No Immunity for Glyphosate Act (Reps. Massie and Pingree) — cuts off funding for the President’s glyphosate executive order, preserving state-law claims against manufacturers like Bayer/Monsanto.
  • H.R. 7867, Infant Formula Safety Modernization Act of 2026 (Rep. DeLauro) — required pathogen testing of formula plants and finished product, including Clostridium botulinum. More on this below.
  • H.R. 8429, Baby Food Safety Act of 2026 (Rep. Krishnamoorthi) — enforceable FDA limits on lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury in baby food, quarterly testing, and mandatory recall authority for products over the limits.

First 100 days

  • H.R. 4958, GRAS Act (Rep. Pallone) — ends “Generally Recognized As Safe” self-certification and requires FDA review before new uses go to market, plus reassessment of substances already on shelves.
  • H.R. 8370, Dietary Supplement Listing Act of 2026 (Rep. Dexter) — mandatory product listing with FDA and a public database.
  • H.R. 2339, Children’s Health Protection Act of 2025 (Rep. Nadler) — makes EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection permanent.
  • Food is Medicine — H.R. 7906, the FOOD for Health Act; H.R. 8390, the National Food as Medicine Program Act; H.R. 5439, a Medicare pilot for medically tailored meals after hospital discharge; and H.R. 7267, produce prescriptions for veterans.
  • School meals — H.R. 9474, the Local Foods for Healthy Schools Act, and H.R. 8928, the Scratch Cooked Meals for Students Act.

First year

  • H.R. 5085, Protect America’s Children from Toxic Pesticides Act (Rep. McGovern) — bans paraquat, organophosphates and neonicotinoids and suspends pesticides already banned in the EU or Canada pending review.
  • H.R. 9231, No Toxic Chemicals in Food Packaging Act of 2026 (Rep. Schakowsky) — keeps PFAS and other hazardous chemicals out of food-contact materials, regulated by class so one chemical cannot simply be swapped for its cousin.
  • Banning harmful additives in school meals (policy idea, no bill text yet) — bars Red 40, Yellow 5 and 6, Blue 1 and 2, and Green 3 from federal school meals.
  • H.R. 6294, Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act of 2025 (Reps. Beyer and Lawler) — front-of-package warning labels on sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods and limits on marketing them to children.

There is a lot on that list worth supporting. Ending GRAS self-certification closes what the memo rightly calls the largest gap in U.S. food safety law, and binding heavy-metal limits in baby food are years overdue. But read the list again: heavy metals, additives, dyes, pesticides, packaging, supplements, nutrition. Those are real risks, mostly chronic and long-tail. Of the sixteen items, exactly one — the formula bill — is about bacteria, viruses or parasites, the things that put children in intensive care this week. I searched all 84 pages. The words Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli, norovirus, raw milk, sprouts, poultry, FSIS, FSMA and traceability do not appear. Cyclospora appears once, as a talking point.

The one pathogen bill: H.R. 7867. I have been pushing Congresswoman DeLauro’s bill since she introduced it, and I am glad to see it slotted into the first 100 hours. The memo’s justification is the right one: Abbott’s Sturgis Cronobacter shutdown in 2022, and the ByHeart C. botulinum outbreak that, by the memo’s count, sickened at least 51 infants in 19 states — “two safety crises in four years.” I represent families from both the ByHeart and Nara Organics botulism outbreaks, so I have a stake in getting this right.

Because I support it, I went back and read the bill text line by line against the memo’s description. Here is what it actually does:

  • Directs FDA to update the infant formula good manufacturing practices to require pathogen testing of the manufacturing facility and of finished product, on top of the existing Cronobacter and Salmonellarequirements.
  • Requires FDA to write a mandatory pathogen list. C. botulinum is the only organism the bill names; everything else is up to the Secretary.
  • Requires a recommended frequency for environmental testing, including Zones 2 and 3 of the plant.
  • Requires a manufacturer to notify FDA within one business day of any positive in formula, even if the product never left the building.
  • Requires records of positives, in formula and in the facility, to be kept for inspectors.
  • Requires FDA to tell the appropriations and health committees in both chambers within one business day of a finished-formula positive or an “Official Action Indicated” inspection finding.
  • Requires consistent inspection and compliance standards regardless of country of origin, and final rules within 90 days.

That is a real step forward, and the one-day notice provision alone closes a gap that should never have existed. But a two-page bill leaves most of the hard questions to FDA, and for whoever marks it up, here is where I would make it stronger:

  • Make environmental testing mandatory, not recommended. The text asks FDA to set a “recommended frequency.” Recommendations are not enforceable. Set a floor.
  • Report environmental positives. The one-day notice applies only to positives in infant formula. A C. botulinum hit in Zone 2 only has to be written down and kept for an inspector. An environmental positive is the early warning — the whole point of looking for it is to act before product is contaminated.
  • Name Zone 1. The bill calls out Zones 2 and 3 but never mentions food-contact surfaces by name. It should.
  • Test ingredients. FDA’s whole-genome sequencing traced the ByHeart botulinum to organic whole milk powder at the supplier’s processor. The bill reaches the formula plant and the finished can — not the incoming ingredients where ByHeart’s problem started.
  • Set a sampling floor and hold the product. C. botulinum spores in powder are hard to find at low levels, and a negative test on a handful of grams proves very little. The sampling plan decides whether testing means anything. Write a minimum into the statute, and require that lots be held until results come back.
  • Backstop the deadline. Ninety days is not a realistic timeline for notice-and-comment rulemaking, and the bill says nothing about what happens if FDA misses it. Give it teeth.

None of that is a reason to slow the bill down. It is a reason to make sure that when it passes, it does what parents will assume it does.

What is missing. Here is where the memo goes quiet.

Meat and poultry. USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service does not appear anywhere in the memo. In 2025, USDA withdrew its proposed framework that would have treated high levels of Salmonella in raw poultry as adulteration. Salmonella makes an estimated 1.35 million Americans sick every year. We have done this before: the Jack in the Box outbreak pushed FSIS to declare E. coli O157:H7 an adulterant in ground beef in 1994, and hamburger got dramatically safer. A Democratic food safety agenda that skips poultry has skipped the biggest single pathogen problem in the American food supply.

Produce and Cyclospora. The memo cites “the current Cyclospora outbreak” — and it is a big one. The cluster tied to Taylor Farms de México iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell had reached 10,930 illnesses in 17 states, at least 454 hospitalizations and two deaths as of August 20, and CDC notes the true number is likely much higher. Yet the memo proposes nothing on produce: nothing on agricultural water, nothing on imported produce inspection, nothing on traceability. Meanwhile, FDA has pushed back the compliance date for the food traceability rule — the rule that is supposed to let investigators follow a head of lettuce back to the field — to 2028.

Raw milk, raw milk cheese and sprouts. For a chapter titled “Reclaiming MAHA,” the silence on raw milk is striking. Raw milk is the movement’s signature food. This fall alone we have seen the Graziers raw milk cheese *E. coli* O26 outbreak and two little girls with HUS after drinking milk from an unlicensed goat dairy. On or shortly after October 9, I plan to file FDA citizen petitions asking for warning statements on cheese made from unpasteurized milk and on raw sprouts. A Democratic agenda could simply direct FDA to grant them.

The people who find outbreaks. Remember that sentence from the memo’s opening, faulting the administration for eliminating the programs we use to prevent, detect and contain outbreaks? Not one proposal in the memo restores them. The National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods — the body that advised both FDA and USDA on pathogens, criteria and sampling — was terminated in 2025, as Susan Mayne pointed out this week. FDA’s foods program has lost experts and staff. CDC’s FoodNet surveillance has been scaled back. And right now eleven open investigations on FDA’s outbreak table name no food at all, and they carry 675 sick people. You cannot recall what you cannot identify, and you cannot identify what nobody is funded to look for.

What I would add. If House Democrats want a food safety agenda that matches their rhetoric, here is a pathogen package that would fit comfortably in the first 100 days:

  1. Pass H.R. 7867 — with mandatory environmental testing, reporting of environmental positives, ingredient testing, and a statutory sampling floor.
  2. Direct FSIS to finalize enforceable Salmonella standards for raw poultry.
  3. Restore NACMCF, fully fund CDC and state foodborne illness surveillance and public health labs, and rebuild FDA’s Human Foods Program staff.
  4. Hold the line on food traceability — no more delays.
  5. Require warning statements on raw milk cheese and raw sprouts, and enforce the existing ban on interstate sale of raw milk.
  6. Fund FDA inspection of imported produce and finish the agricultural water rules.

None of this is partisan. Look at the cosponsors already on the bills in this memo — Thomas Massie on glyphosate, Jeff Van Drew on infant formula, Mike Lawler on front-of-package labels, Jen Kiggans on Food is Medicine. Republicans and Democrats both have kids who eat lettuce, chicken and formula.

The memo is right that food safety is a winning issue and right that Americans want it taken seriously. Chemicals are the long fight, and I hope Democrats win it. But pathogens are what make people sick this week, and they deserve more than one bill and one passing mention of Cyclospora. If the goal is to reclaim MAHA, start with what is putting people in the hospital right now. And then let’s make it so the next time someone like me goes looking for a case, there isn’t one to find. That has always been the goal — to put myself out of business by making food safe. Here is the full document.