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 The only product positive ever announced, a border sample on July 18, was withdrawn as a false positive the next day.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.

FDA announced on September 30 a nationwide push to recruit new members for its advisory committees — more than 30 of them. Scientific experts, consumer representatives, the whole range. Here is the FDA news release.

Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas said the agency is “actively inviting people from across the country who are on the forefront of their fields — clinicians, researchers, and community voices who can bring the latest science, real-world experience, and fresh perspectives to the FDA’s deliberations.”

Good. Advisory committees matter. They are one of the few places where outside scientists get to put hard questions to the agency in public.

But as Dr. Susan Mayne pointed out on LinkedIn, there is a hole in the middle of this announcement that you could drive a truck through.

“It is great that FDA is trying to expand scientific expertise on an advisory committee meetings, with one major exception — where is the ‘F’ in FDA? FDA is accepting nominations for >30 advisory committees, not one of which is devoted to food and/or nutrition. The FDA Science Advisory Board is the only one that mentions food or nutrition expertise.”

“I understand that running advisory committee meetings takes expert time and resources, and with the losses of experts and supporting staff at FDA in the foods program the remaining ones likely do not have bandwidth to do this right now, but if we really want to support food and nutrition at FDA then I would love to see a Food and Nutrition Advisory Committee on the list (as has been done in the past — I served on an FDA Nutrition Subcommittee to the Food Advisory Committee in the early 2000s). Also noting that the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria in Foods (NACMCF), which supported both FDA and USDA, was abruptly terminated by the Trump administration in 2025.”

When Susan Mayne says this, it is worth stopping to listen.

Dr. Mayne ran the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition — CFSAN — from January 2015 until she retired in May 2023. CFSAN is the part of FDA responsible for the safety and labeling of roughly 80 percent of the American food supply. She did that job for eight years, under two administrations, through outbreak after outbreak. She knows exactly what the agency can and cannot do, and she knows what it costs when the science function gets thinned out.

Before FDA, she spent nearly three decades at Yale, where she held an endowed chair as the C.-E.A. Winslow Professor of Epidemiology, chaired the Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, and served as Associate Director of the Yale Cancer Center. She is now Professor (adjunct) of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. Her research career focused on diet and nutrition as determinants of chronic disease. In other words, she is not a commentator with an opinion about food policy. She is one of the people who built the evidence base, and then went and ran the agency that has to act on it.

So read the FDA release again with her question in mind. The vacancies listed span oncology, cardiovascular medicine, neurology, genetics, medical devices. All of it serious, all of it necessary. And not one committee devoted to food or nutrition — at an agency whose first letter stands for food.

This is the part that should trouble people. Food is where most Americans actually encounter FDA. Not once in a lifetime at a cancer diagnosis, but three times a day, every day, for every one of us. And the harm is not hypothetical. I have spent over thirty years representing the people on the other end of that failure — children on dialysis after E. coli O157:H7, families burying a parent after Listeria, infants hospitalized with botulism from powdered formula.

Dr. Mayne’s point about NACMCF deserves its own paragraph. The National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria in Foods was the body that gave both FDA and USDA independent, expert advice on the microbiological side of food safety — the pathogens, the criteria, the sampling. It was terminated in 2025. So the agency has now eliminated the standing committee that handled foodborne pathogens, and in the same breath announced it is recruiting broadly for everything except food.

There is also an irony here that should not go unmentioned. The Acting Commissioner issuing this release, Kyle Diamantas, came up through the Human Foods Program. Of all the people to let a 30-committee recruitment drive go out the door without a food seat at the table, you would not expect it to be him.

I take Dr. Mayne’s point about bandwidth seriously, and she is being fair in raising it. The foods program has lost experts and support staff. Running an advisory committee properly is real work, and a committee that meets once and goes quiet is worse than none at all. But bandwidth is a budget decision, not a law of nature. If FDA has the capacity to stand up and support more than 30 committees across the rest of the agency, the absence of one for food is a choice about priorities.

The fix is straightforward and FDA has done it before. Reconstitute a Food and Nutrition Advisory Committee. Bring back NACMCF or something that does its job. Put the microbiologists, the epidemiologists, the nutrition scientists and yes, the consumer representatives, in a room and let them ask hard questions in public.

Nominations for consumer representative positions are due November 15, 2026, and nominations for scientific and technical voting members are due November 30, 2026. Self-nominations are accepted. If you work in food safety or nutrition science, put your name in anyway — and say in your nomination what Dr. Mayne said.

The “F” came first for a reason.

As of this morning, CDC’s count in the E. coli O26:H11 outbreak linked to Sierra Nevada Cheese Company’s Graziers grass-fed raw milk cheese stands where it stood on September 25: 13 sick in nine states, eight hospitalized, three with hemolytic uremic syndrome, no deaths. Over half of the sick are children 5 and younger. Illnesses began between July 7 and August 26. All nine people interviewed ate Graziers raw milk cheese, against a background rate of 4.9 percent.

The company’s recall notice finally appeared on FDA’s site on September 29. It lists ten products, from 8-ounce squares to 40-pound cheddar blocks sold to wholesalers, distributed nationwide through distributors, retailers and direct customers, and it still names no lot code, date code or production date. If it is Graziers raw milk cheese, it is recalled.

Marler Clark represents the family of a child who developed HUS after eating Graziers cheese, and families in last fall’s Twin Sisters Creamery raw milk cheese outbreak.

The rates are high, and that is the point

Eight of 13 hospitalized is 62 percent. Three HUS of 13 is 23 percent. CDC’s own burden estimates put the hospitalization rate for laboratory-confirmed non-O157 STEC infections at about 13 percent, and for O157 at 46 percent, and CDC’s rule of thumb is that 5 to 10 percent of people diagnosed with a STEC infection develop HUS, with young children at the high end. The three other raw milk cheese E. coli outbreaks of the last 31 months ran 11 sick, five hospitalized and two HUS (Raw Farm, 2024); 10, one and none (Twin Sisters, 2025); and nine, three and one (Raw Farm, 2026). This one is above all of them.

There are two explanations. Either the strain is unusually dangerous, or the count is missing the people who got less sick. Both are probably true, and they point the same direction.

The strain

E. coli O26:H11 is not one bug. The best-known O26 outbreak in this country, the Chipotle outbreak of 2015, put 21 of 55 people in the hospital and caused no HUS at all. The O26:H11 strains that carry the stx2a toxin gene are a different animal. In France, stx2-carrying O26:H11 has become the leading cause of pediatric HUSover the last decade, and the French reference laboratory reports a rising share of those strains in food, including raw milk products.

France lived through this outbreak in 2019. Raw cow’s milk Saint-Félicien and Saint-Marcellin cheeses carried O26:H11 with stx2a. Between March 25 and April 27, French pediatric departments reported 19 suspected STEC-HUS cases, against five to 10 in the same weeks of earlier years; the outbreak was ultimately counted at 16 cases, 14 of them children with HUS, aged six months to four years, and the clinical series reached 20 HUS patients in eight pediatric nephrology centers by September. Italy saw it in 2013: an O26:H11 stx2 outbreak put 20 children with HUS, median age 17 months, into hospitals in one region, two with severe neurological damage. The authors’ conclusion was that O26 infections in children have a high probability of progressing to HUS.

CDC has not said which toxin genes the Graziers strain carries. PulseNet has the sequences, and so do the California and Nevada laboratories. It is a one-sentence answer, and it matters: if this is the stx2a clone, three HUS cases out of 13 is not a surprise. It is the pattern.

The undercount

The 13 are the people whose stool sample grew an isolate that was sequenced and matched in PulseNet. A toddler with three days of diarrhea who never saw a doctor is not in the count. A patient whose laboratory ran a Shiga toxin panel but never cultured an isolate is not in the count. The sicker you are, the more likely you are to be tested, cultured, sequenced and counted, which is exactly why the counted cases skew toward hospitalization and HUS. France 2019 shows the mechanism in its purest form: 14 HUS cases and two cases of plain diarrhea, because the surveillance system was built to find HUS and the mild cases were never looked for.

CDC says so itself: the real number of sick people is likely much higher than the number reported, and the outbreak may reach beyond the nine states. Its burden study estimates that for every laboratory-confirmed non-O157 STEC infection, about 107 go undiagnosed; for O157, about 26.

Expect the count to move. The most recent onset is August 26, CDC’s lag from illness to a counted case runs three to four weeks, the recall notice with product codes did not post until September 29, the cheese keeps for months, and 40-pound blocks went to food service. September’s illnesses are still working their way through the system.

Not the plant’s first positive

As far as the CDC and FDA record shows, this is the first outbreak attributed to Sierra Nevada Cheese Company. It is not the first pathogen found in its cheese. On August 27, 2025, California’s State Veterinarian ordered a statewide recall and quarantine of the company’s Bella Capra raw goat milk cheddar after the California Department of Food and Agriculture found Listeria monocytogenes in a routine sample collected August 14 at the Willows manufacturing and packaging facility. One lot, no illnesses reported. The company sold that cheese as aged a minimum of 120 days. The Graziers labels say “Aged at least 60 days,” and the sharp cheddar “Aged over 120 days.” Thirteen months apart, at the same plant, two pathogens outlasted the only safeguard federal law requires of a raw milk cheese.

The 60-day rule and the petition

FDA’s standards of identity for cheddar and Monterey jack allow unpasteurized milk if the cheese is held at least 60 days at not less than 35°F, a rule adopted in 1949. The joint FDA and Health Canada risk assessment released in 2013 estimated the per-serving listeriosis risk of soft-ripened cheese made from raw milk at 50 to 160 times that of the pasteurized version, and FDA said then that it would reevaluate the 60-day rule. Its own sampling of 1,606 aged raw milk cheeses in 2014 through 2016 found Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. Four outbreaks in 31 months: 43 sick, 17 hospitalized, six children with HUS, all from cheese that complied with the rule.

I have been working on a citizen petition to FDA under 21 CFR 10.30. It asks for two things: a prescribed warning statement on cheese made from unpasteurized milk, added to 21 CFR 101.17, the regulation that has required a warning on unpasteurized juice since 1998; and completion of the 60-day reevaluation FDA promised in 2013. The petition will disclose that the firm represents families in the Twin Sisters and Graziers outbreaks.

The draft is posted here. I want it to be right before I file. Every count, date and quotation in it is footnoted, and I would rather hear what I got wrong now than from FDA later. Send comments to bmarler@marlerclark.com by Friday, October 9. Then it gets filed.

Thirteen is where the count stands today. It is not where it will end.

FDA updated its Investigations of Foodborne Illness Outbreaks table on September 30. The joint E. coliO157:H7 file I wrote about last week and again on Tuesday, FDA reference #1421 and USDA-FSIS reference 2026-04, went from 25 sick to 38, and FDA has initiated sample collection. The product line still reads Not Yet Identified. The Listeria file posted beside it on September 23, #1417, went from 40 to 44. A third Listeria file, #1415, was posted September 30 with eleven sick and no food named. The egg file and the infant formula file moved to the closed list.

That leaves sixteen active investigations, down from the seventeen I walked through on Tuesday off the September 25 stamp. Eleven name no food, and those eleven carry 675 sick people, up from ten files and 645. Add the counts FDA publishes on the advisories for the five named files, Graziers raw milk cheese (13), Evergreen broccoli sprouts (32), alfalfa sprouts (55), jalapeño peppers (431) and iceberg lettuce (12,883), and the table describes 14,089 illnesses, 642 hospitalizations where a number is given, and two deaths, both from Cyclospora.

Thirty-eight sick, samples at a laboratory, no food on the page

Reference #1421 was posted September 23 with 25 sick. One week later it is 38, a gain of thirteen, the largest one-week move on the table. FDA’s table definitions say the case count is supplied by CDC, and CDC’s own weekly page, updated September 30, now counts eight active multistate E. coli investigations, up from six the week before, 33 investigations in all. CDC still names none of them. There is no FDA advisory, no inspection marked, no states, no onset dates, no hospitalizations and no ages.

The new check mark is in the sampling column. FDA’s definition of that column is collection of samples for the presence or absence of a pathogen in a food or in the environment surrounding the food, collected by FDA or by a state and analyzed by FDA, with significant findings reported in a public health advisory. Read it plainly. Nobody samples a food they have not identified. A sample means investigators had a candidate product in hand, from a store shelf, a distributor or a sick person’s refrigerator, or an environment where that product was made, and sent it to a laboratory. The product column says Not Yet Identified. The sampling column says someone knows what to test.

The USDA side says more. FSIS’s outbreak table carries 2026-04 as its only active investigation of 2026, product Unknown, with a note that FSIS and FDA are investigating the outbreak together. The same page explains the rules: FSIS posts an investigation when there is compelling evidence that a meat, poultry or egg product is a confirmed or suspected source, and an outbreak appears on both tables when products regulated by both agencies are suspected sources. Two tables, one file, and by the agencies’ own rules a suspect on each side of the jurisdictional line.

That is why the two phone calls I described on Tuesday still matter. Two people, culture-confirmed, told by their health departments they are part of a multistate E. coli outbreak with no food named, and both bought a meat-and-vegetable sandwich wrap from the same chain in different states. My two epidemiologists have the state, local, CDC, FDA and FSIS records on order. I am still not naming the store, and two interviews are still not an epidemiologic study. But a wrap is precisely the food that produces a file with two reference numbers, meat from an FSIS-inspected plant, produce and tortilla from FDA’s side, and nothing posted September 30 cuts against it. CDC says it usually takes three to four weeks to match a sick person to an outbreak; the thirteen added this week got sick weeks ago.

The agencies have shown they can speak before the ingredient is settled. On October 22, 2024, FDA, FSIS and CDC announced the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder outbreak while, in FDA’s words, a specific ingredient had not yet been confirmed as the source. FDA said it was tracing the slivered onions, FSIS said it was tracing the beef patties, and McDonald’s pulled both the same day. Eight days later FSIS reported that its beef traceback found no beef source and that the patty samples were negative. The public knew what was in play from the first day. For #1421, at 38 and climbing, the public has two reference numbers.

The eleven files with no food named

Ref.PathogenPostedDaysSick (change)FDA steps marked
1415Listeria monocytogenes9/30111 (new)Traceback
1421E. coli O157:H7 (USDA 2026-04)9/23838 (+13)Traceback, sampling
1417Listeria monocytogenes9/23844 (+4)Traceback
1403SalmonellaNewport8/2636116 (—)Traceback, sampling
1402Salmonella
I 4,[5],12:i:-		8/125043 (—)Traceback, inspection, sampling
1398Cyclospora(outbreak ended)8/55722 (—)Traceback, sampling
1392Cyclospora(outbreak ended)7/2271235 (+1)Traceback, sampling
1379Listeria monocytogenes7/227111 (+1)Traceback, inspection, sampling
1385Cyclospora(outbreak ended)7/88538 (—)Traceback, sampling
1384Cyclospora(outbreak ended)7/88518 (—)Traceback
1387SalmonellaOranienburg7/88599 (—)Traceback, inspection, sampling
 Eleven files  675 (+30) 

Counts from FDA’s table as posted September 30; changes measured against the September 25 stamp; days counted from the posting date to October 1, 2026.

Salmonella Newport, #1403, is the largest. Posted August 26 with 84 sick, it is 116 today, thirty-six days in, with traceback and sampling marked, no inspection, no advisory and no CDC notice. For scale, FDA closed a Newport file in 2025, #1291, at 36 sick with no food named, and closed this year’s Newport cantaloupe file, #1366, at 70. Salmonella Oranienburg, #1387, is the oldest: posted July 8, 85 days ago, 99 sick, with traceback, inspection and sampling all marked. Three tools, no food. Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:-, #1402, is 43 sick after fifty days with the same three check marks.

Three open Listeria files name no food, and together they hold 66 people. The table has no hospitalization or death columns, and for Listeria that omission matters more than for any other pathogen on the page. The last joint FDA–FSIS Listeria file, #1305, the 2025 ready-to-eat sandwich file, was ten sick, ten hospitalized and one dead on FDA’s own closing summary. Forty-four, the count on #1417 after eight days with traceback alone, is large by this table’s own standard: the five Listeria files FDA closed in 2025 without naming a food topped out at 36.

The four Cyclospora rows, 235, 38, 22 and 18, hold 313 people whose outbreaks have ended, by FDA’s own column, with the investigation still active and no food named. They are a sliver of the roughly 7,000 confirmed Cyclospora cases in CDC’s season count beyond the 12,883 in the iceberg lettuce outbreak.

How files like these usually end

FDA’s 2025 closed list, below the active table, is the base rate. It holds 26 investigations. Twelve closed with the product column reading Not Identified, and those twelve carry 286 people: five Listeria files, four Salmonella, one Cyclospora, one E. coli O145 and one hepatitis A. Nearly half of what FDA closed last year never named a food. The exceptions cut both ways. #1382, the O157 file posted July 1 with 14 sick and no food, closed September 10 with Romaine Lettuce in the product column and no grower or processor named. And #1305, the sandwich file, was not solved by traceback at all: FDA inspectors found the outbreak strain in a San Fernando plant on a routine visit in April 2025, months after the last illness, and even then the summary kept the sandwich as a suspect rather than a confirmed vehicle. A joint file is not a promise of an answer.

Two files closed

The egg file, #1378, which has read complete on its own advisory since September 3 and still read Active on the table Tuesday, is on the closed list: 134 sick, 34 hospitalized, 18 states, Midwest Poultry Services a likely source, and sick people in twelve states where no recalled egg was ever confirmed. The infant formula file, #1383, closed at four infants; FDA’s advisory says the outbreak investigation has ended while its root-cause work on the Organic West Milk and Dairy Farmers of America supply chain shared with the 2025 ByHeart outbreak continues.

Marler Clark represents people sickened in the iceberg lettuce and Kebab Shop kofta outbreaks, the family of a child who developed HUS in the Graziers outbreak, and families in the Nara and ByHeart infant formula outbreaks, and my office is investigating the two E. coli callers described above.

Sixteen open. Eleven with no food named, 675 people. One joint file at 38 and rising, with samples at a laboratory and a product line that says nothing. Somebody has already written a food on a sample label. Say what it is, say which states, and say which ingredient each agency is tracing.

Annie Waldman at ProPublica published a piece this morning that everyone who regulates, sells or drinks raw milk should read. It is the story of Emily Marris, her 17-month-old daughter Brooklyn, and a 6-year-old girl named Victoria Galindo. Both girls drank raw goat milk from Moonlight Ridge, an unlicensed farm in Riverside County, California, owned by Courtney Baker, in the spring of 2025. Marris found the farm through a Facebook group run by her chiropractor, Chris Boman. Both ended up in intensive care at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego with hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). Brooklyn’s stool culture confirmed E. coliO157:H7.

I have represented children with HUS since 1993. The details in Waldman’s reporting are ones I have heard at far too many kitchen tables: vomiting that turns bilious, then dialysis lines, a ventilator, seizures, a heart struggling against blood gone acidic, and parents who do not know whether their child will live through the night. Brooklyn survived. She came home with a limp, night terrors and a nephrologist she will see every six months, likely for the rest of her life. Victoria also needs ongoing monitoring.

What makes this story different is what the State of California did, and did not do, with the evidence it had.

What did Courtney Baker know about who was drinking her milk?

Everything. Baker has since said it was all “pet milk,” but ProPublica describes a paper trail showing she knew from the first day that a baby was drinking it. When Marris picked up her first unlabeled jug in January 2025, still warm, she pointed to Brooklyn asleep in her car seat and told Baker about the toddler’s digestive problems. Once home, Marris texted that Brooklyn was gulping it from a bottle. Baker wrote back that she was glad, and later that day asked, “How’s her tummy handling the milk?” The next morning Marris reported back on the baby’s diapers.

Marris and her husband later visited the farm to see the herd and asked about safety. Baker, they recall, told them repeatedly that the herd and milk were “clean and tested.” For the next six months Baker sold milk to a mother she knew was putting it in her toddler’s bottle.

The Galindos’ story is the same. Baker had once tutored their son in math and was advertising raw goat milk in a local Facebook group. When they picked up their first jug on June 2, 2025, the same day Brooklyn first vomited, the Galindos say they told Baker it was for their six-year-old daughter. And when CDFA’s undercover investigator asked to buy a gallon, nobody at the farm said anything about pets.

Then came what Baker did after she knew children were sick. On June 5, Marris texted from the hospital that doctors suspected the milk. Baker answered that her tests had shown nothing abnormal, then conceded in the same exchange that she had not tested for E. coli and that the tests she could find seemed to be for meat. On June 14, after a second child was hospitalized, Marris asked her to hold off selling. Baker did not reply. The next day she answered a buyer on Facebook offering raw goat milk from a “clean tested herd.” When Marris publicly warned the group, Baker asked her to take the post down. According to the families, Baker never told the hospital or either family that another child had fallen ill.

The first time anyone heard the words “pet food” was June 20, when regulators showed up at the gate.

What did California regulators have?

According to ProPublica, investigators with the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) had all of that: two cooperating families, hospital records, Marris’ screenshots of months of text messages, and the undercover investigator’s exchange with the farm.

Selling raw milk for human consumption in California without a license can bring fines of up to $10,000 and up to a year in jail. A CDFA regional supervisor wrote to her team, “She clearly knew the milk was going to a child.”

What did California actually do?

On June 20, 2025, regulators handed Baker a cease-and-desist order and a notice of violation for operating a food facility without a permit. Neither carried a penalty. The next day they accepted a half-gallon jug of milk that Baker herself said she had collected the night before. Because California law does not allow investigators onto unlicensed property, they did not collect milk themselves or sample manure, soil or water, as they have done at licensed dairies.

That sample came back negative. Regulators then helped Baker get back into business, selling the same raw goat milk, still without a license, inspection or pathogen testing, as long as it was labeled and registered as pet food. CDFA closed its case on August 1, 2025, finding she had sold unapproved milk without a license, and imposed no penalty. No referral went to the Riverside County District Attorney. Baker has since moved her operation to Arizona.

Why is a negative test weeks later meaningless?

Because raw milk lasts days, not weeks. The milk that sickened Brooklyn and Victoria was long gone before anyone collected a sample, and E. coli O157:H7 is shed intermittently by animals that look perfectly healthy. A single half-gallon, gathered unsupervised by the person under investigation, after she had been told her milk was suspected in two HUS cases, tells you nothing about the milk those girls drank. I made the same point about Dungeness Valley Creamery this month: in three of that dairy’s four outbreaks, Washington never found the bacteria in the milk. Absence of a positive sample is not evidence of safety. Two unrelated children with the same rare strain after drinking the same farm’s milk is evidence.

What is the “pet food” loophole?

In California, an unlicensed farm can sell raw milk if it is labeled for animals. According to ProPublica, 13 other states allow raw milk to be sold only as pet food, even though everyone, including the regulators, knows people drink it. Outbreaks in Louisiana this year and Florida last year sickened children, at least one of whom developed HUS. No dairy was held responsible because the milk was “legally sold and clearly labeled.”

Baker told Waldman that everything she sold was pet milk and that what customers did with it was not her business. A label does not change what goes into a toddler’s bottle. When a seller knows the buyer is a mother feeding her baby, the label is not a loophole; it is a fig leaf.

What role did chiropractor Chris Boman play?

Chris Boman is a Murrieta chiropractor who specializes in pediatric and prenatal care. He is also one of three administrators of a private Facebook group of backyard farmers, and for years, Marris told ProPublica, he sold raw milk from his own cow out of his clinic’s waiting room. In January 2025, Boman posted a photo in the group of a refrigerator full of fresh raw milk. Marris, a patient who was struggling to wean her premature “miracle baby,” commented asking whether it would be good for Brooklyn. Group members urged raw goat milk instead and pointed her to Moonlight Ridge. That is how a 17-month-old ended up drinking Baker’s milk.

After Brooklyn and Victoria were hospitalized, Marris posted a warning in Boman’s group when she saw someone else advertising raw milk. She was suspended. When she complained, Boman replied that he was not a mediator, that people could read her story and decide for themselves whether to assume the risk, and asked whether she wanted anything else from the group.

Boman told Waldman that Marris was “drumming up a bunch of fear.” He said he had talked with Baker, was satisfied her standards were high and pointed to her negative tests, the same unsupervised sample gathered weeks after the illnesses. He also connected Baker with the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that assists raw dairy sellers, through his own membership. The fund says it is not representing Baker in the lawsuit. Boman still believes in raw milk; he told Waldman he stopped selling it only because his cow went dry.

Think about that. A health care provider whose practice is built around pregnant women and children, selling raw milk in his waiting room, running a group where mothers are steered to unlicensed dairies, and then silencing the one mother whose child nearly died. Boman is not a defendant in the case, but his part in this story deserves as much attention as the farmer’s.

What should change?

First, when there is evidence a seller knew “pet” milk was going to people, and here the evidence was in writing, regulators should refer the case for prosecution. CDFA told ProPublica that a cease-and-desist gets product off the market faster than a criminal referral. Fine. Do both. Nothing prevents regulators from stopping sales today and sending the file to the district attorney tomorrow.

Second, California and every state with a pet-milk exception should require the same pathogen testing for “pet” raw milk that licensed dairies face, and should give investigators authority to sample animals and the environment on any farm linked to human illness, licensed or not. A lab result from a jar the suspect hands over at the gate should never close a case.

Third, the label should say what the risk is. I am about to file a citizen petition with FDA asking for a warning label on raw milk cheese. States should require one on raw milk, whatever species it is sold for.

Where does the case stand now?

I filed suit on behalf of the Marris and Galindo families against Courtney Baker and Moonlight Ridge in Riverside County Superior Court, alleging Baker negligently sold them contaminated raw milk presented as fit for human consumption. Baker has said the farm will fully defend the case. When the state walks away, the civil courts are what is left.

Is raw milk worth the risk for a child?

No. Raw milk has no proven nutritional advantage over pasteurized milk and carries far higher risk of foodborne illness; a Johns Hopkins analysis put it at more than 100 times. This year alone we have seen Raw Farm, Graziers raw milk cheese, and Campylobacter outbreaks in Idaho. Most of the children with HUS are five and under.

Marris now spends her evenings in Facebook groups like Boman’s, telling her story to other mothers. Sometimes she gets attacked for it; sometimes her posts get deleted. She is doing the job the State of California declined to do. Read Waldman’s full story. Then drink pasteurized milk.

In the last twenty-four hours, two people have called my office. Both have culture-confirmed E. coli. Both have been told they are part of a multistate E. coli outbreak linked to a food that has not been named. When each of them went back through what they ate before they got sick, the same item came up: a sandwich wrap, meat and vegetables, bought at the same store. The same chain, that is. The two of them live in different states.

Two phone calls are not an epidemiologic study, and I am not naming the store. I do not have what the agencies have. The two epidemiologists on my staff are working on the link between the two callers now. They have ordered the state and local health department records on both, along with records from CDC, FDA and FSIS, and there will be more to say once those come in. What I have today is two interviews that line up with a file I wrote about last week, and they line up well.

What the three federal pages say today

FDA’s CORE table, stamped September 25, carries reference #1421: E. coli O157:H7, 25 sick, product not yet identified, traceback initiated, no inspection, no sampling. The row carries USDA’s reference number, 2026-04, and it is the only active row on FDA’s table with one. FSIS’s outbreak table lists 2026-04 as a September investigation, product Unknown, with a note that FSIS and FDA are investigating it together. It is the only active investigation FSIS has posted all year. CDC’s weekly page, last updated September 23, counts six active multistate E. coli investigations and names none of them. No states, no onset dates, no hospitalizations, no ages. I went through all three pages this morning.

What being told you are part of an outbreak means

When a health department tells someone, they are part of a multistate outbreak, it is not the patient’s guess, and it is not the health department’s either. The patient’s stool culture grew E. coli. A public health laboratory sequenced the bacteria’s genome and uploaded the result to PulseNet, CDC’s national database of DNA fingerprints. The sequence matched the cluster. Then came the questionnaire: everything eaten in the week before illness, every store, every restaurant. My two callers answered that questionnaire in different states, and gave the same answer, before either of them talked to me.

CDC’s own timing rule matters here. Its outbreak pages say it usually takes three to four weeks to determine whether a sick person is part of an outbreak. A count posted on September 23 is made of people who got sick weeks earlier. The people whose sequences are matching this week are the next update.

Why a wrap explains the two reference numbers

Last week I laid out how FDA and USDA divide the food supply: meat and poultry to FSIS, everything else to FDA, a percentage formula for foods that contain both, and sandwiches as the standing joke. The joke is more specific than most people know. FSIS’s own directive says closed-face sandwiches, a meat or poultry filling between two slices of bread, a biscuit or a bun, are FDA’s, a decision the agencies trace to the 1930s. Wraps are different. When wrap makers argued that a wrap is close enough to a closed-face sandwich to be FDA’s too, FSIS disagreed: wraps were new, the old sandwich decision did not cover them, and a wrap with meat is a meat product, like a burrito. The two agencies put that in the Federal Register in November 2005, alongside a proposal, then under consideration, to move closed-face sandwiches to FSIS. The move never happened. Twenty-one years later the sandwich is still FDA’s, and FSIS’s stated position on a wrap with meat is that it is a meat product.

Now put a meat-and-vegetable wrap on the traceback desk. The turkey or roast beef or chicken inside it came from an FSIS-inspected plant. The lettuce, the tomato, the onion and the tortilla are FDA’s. If the wrap was assembled in the store’s own kitchen, the store is a retail operation under state or county inspection, and the traceback runs to its suppliers on both sides of the line. If it came in sealed from a manufacturer, that plant belongs to one agency or the other, but its ingredients still came from both. Either way, one sick person’s wrap produces two traceback questions, one to a meat supplier and one to a produce supplier, and neither agency can close its file until its half is ruled out. That is a file with two numbers on it. It is what #1421 looks like on paper.

The last time both agencies had a sandwich file

The last joint file before this one, #1305, carried USDA 2025-06, and FDA’s own closing summary of it is titled Deli Sandwich (suspect). That was the Fresh & Ready Foods Listeria outbreak: ready-to-eat sandwiches and snack items, turkey and cheese, ham and cheese, beef cheesesteak, sold at convenience stores, hospitals, hotels, airports and airlines in Arizona, California, Nevada and Washington. Ten people sick, all ten hospitalized, one dead. Here is the part worth remembering. FDA and CDC investigated that cluster in 2024 and could not identify a source; the specimens dated from December 2023 to September 2024. The answer came in April 2025, when FDA inspectors on a routine visit found Listeria in the San Fernando plant and the sequence matched the outbreak strain. The public heard the company’s name in May 2025, and even then, the summary says the sandwich was never confirmed as the vehicle; it remained the suspect. A joint file is no guarantee of an answer, and a routine inspection, not the traceback, is what found the strain in the last one.

What an announcement without a food looks like

The agencies do not need a brand name to say something. On October 28, 2020, FDA announced two E. coliO157:H7 outbreaks, 23 sick in one and 21 sick with one death in the other and said in so many words that it did not know what food was making people sick or whether that food was even FDA-regulated. It called the announcement early communication, and it promised a new web resource for early updates on active investigations. The clusters were posted as Unknown Source 1, 2 and 3, with the states listed. The table FDA keeps today grew out of that promise. It posts the count and withholds the states.

What I am asking for is what I asked for last week, plus one item. Say which states. Say the onset dates. Say whether the suspect food is a mixed product, and which ingredient each agency is tracing. And if a sandwich wrap is on the traceback desk, say so now, because a wrap sold this afternoon will take three to four weeks to show up in PulseNet. In October 2024, FDA, FSIS and CDC announced the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder outbreak while the onions and the patties were still being sorted out, and McDonald’s pulled both the same day. The public was told what was in play. That is the standard, and it was met two years ago.

To the people who are calling

The two people who called did the right things first. They went to a doctor, they were tested, and they went back through their food history item by item. If you have been told you are part of this outbreak, do the same, and keep the receipt, the loyalty-card record and any packaging that is left; write down the date and the store. Interviews are how outbreaks get solved. The percentages that put McDonald’s onions and patties side by side in 2024 came from them.

I have represented people sickened by E. coli since 1993. My hamburger cases went away because FSIS declared O157:H7 an adulterant in ground beef in September 1994; since about 2000, most of my E. coli cases have been lettuce. A meat-and-vegetable wrap is both halves of that history in one package. Last week I asked which side of the jurisdictional line this outbreak was on. Two phone calls suggest the answer is both, and that the reason no food has been named may be that the food is a sandwich. Twenty-five was the count on September 23. It is a floor. The agencies know what they are tracing. The rest of us are finding out one phone call at a time, and my epidemiologists and I will report what the records show.

Earlier today I wrote about the Mezzetta peperoncini recall, prompted by a consumer’s video of what appears to be a dead mouse in her jar. It made me wonder how often an animal in food produces an official recall, one on an FDA, USDA or state record rather than only in a viral post. The answer, looking back two decades: not often, and when it does, the details tend to surface weeks later in FDA’s Enforcement Report rather than in any notice a shopper would see.

The rule is simple. Under 21 U.S.C. § 342(a)(3), a food is adulterated if it consists in whole or in part of any filthy, putrid or decomposed substance; under § 342(a)(4), it is adulterated if it was prepared, packed or held under insanitary conditions whereby it may have become contaminated with filth. FDA’s Defect Levels Handbook tolerates a few insect fragments or rodent hairs in some commodities. There is no allowance for a carcass, and 21 CFR 117.35(c) says pests must not be allowed in any area of a food plant. Here are the recalls that met that bar, newest first, with what set each off.

The list

1. September 26, 2026 — Mezzetta Golden Greek Peperoncini, Medium Heat, 32 oz. (mouse). One lot, SKU 10106328, Lot 720106, recalled ten days after a consumer posted TikTok videos of what she described as a dead baby mouse in her jar. FDA posted the company’s announcement under “pest contaminant.” It does not say “mouse,” where the jars went or how many there were. Not yet classified.

2. January 16, 2026 — Dr. Praeger’s “Simply Nature” Spinach Bites sold at Aldi (rodent hair). Dr. Praeger’s Sensible Foods recalled 7,894 boxes distributed in Maryland and Pennsylvania because the product had the potential for contamination with rodent hair. FDA classified it Class II on March 16, 2026. No press release was issued; the recall sat in the Enforcement Report two months until Fox Business reported it on March 18. How the hair was detected was never stated.

3. December 26, 2025 — Gold Star Distribution, Minneapolis (rodent and bird contamination in a warehouse). After an inspection, FDA determined the facility was operating under insanitary conditions, with rodent excreta, urine and bird droppings where food, pet food, drugs, devices and cosmetics were stored. The recall ran to 44 pages and nearly 2,000 products shipped to dozens of Minnesota stores plus one each in Fargo and Indianapolis. Classified Class II on January 22, 2026. Prompted by FDA, not a complaint, and not a first offense: FDA had warned the same distributor in October 2018 after its lab confirmed mouse excreta and rodent hairs in the food storage areas.

4. September 30, 2024 — PCC Community Markets Hungarian Mushroom Soup, Seattle (insect larvae). Puget Consumers Co-op recalled 105 tubs of soup made by Ladle & Leaf, sold in its stores and hot bars September 26 to 30. FDA Recall F-0056-2025, Class II: “possible presence of larvae.” PCC’s own notice to members said only that the soup “may contain foreign material.”

5. May 10, 2024 — Lundberg Family Farms Sustainable Wild Blend Gourmet Rice (object “of rodent origin”). Wehah Farms of Richvale, California recalled 4,600 cases, 27,600 one-pound bags, because the rice “may contain a foreign object that appears to be of rodent origin.” Sold in seven states from Maine to Oregon. FDA classified it Class II on July 17, 2024, two months after the recall began. What part of the rodent, and how it was found, was never disclosed.

6. March 27, 2024 — Wegmans frozen cut green beans, packed by Nortera Foods (object “of rodent origin”). Wegmans’ own notice said “pest contamination.” FDA Recall F-1484-2024, Class II, in the Enforcement Report, said the bags may contain a foreign object of rodent origin. Distribution was limited to New York and Pennsylvania. The rodent was in the database, not the store notice.

7. June to August 2023 — G.O. Corporation romaine and lettuce blends, Minneapolis (deer feces). FDA Recall F-1013-2023, Class II, June 16, 2023: 11,500 pounds of romaine and salad blends sold in four Upper Midwest states “may be contaminated with deer feces.” A second round followed on August 1, and on August 7 USDA’s FSIS issued a public health alert for Taher, Inc. salads and wraps built on the recalled lettuce. 

8. July 10, 2023 — Trader Joe’s Unexpected Broccoli Cheddar Soup (insects). Winter Gardens Quality Foods of New Oxford, Pennsylvania recalled 10,889 cases sold in seven states because, in FDA’s words, the product “has insects in the frozen broccoli florets.” Trader Joe’s said its supplier alerted it. FDA classified it Class III.

9. February 18, 2022 — Family Dollar distribution center, West Memphis, Arkansas (rodent infestation). A consumer complaint sent FDA inspectors into the warehouse in January 2022, where they found live and dead rodents, feces, urine, gnawing, nesting, dead birds and bird droppings; fumigation turned up more than 1,100 dead rodents, and company records showed more than 2,300 caught the prior year. Family Dollar recalled food, pet food, supplements, drugs, devices and cosmetics sold at 404 stores in six states. Its plea agreement later admitted stores had reported rodents in deliveries since 2020. In February 2024 the company pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and agreed to pay $41.675 million, the largest criminal penalty in a food safety case.

10. April 8, 2017 — Fresh Express Organic Marketside Spring Mix, sold at Walmart (dead bat). Two Florida consumers ate part of a salad before finding a decomposed bat in it. CDC’s rabies lab could not rule out rabies, and both were started on post-exposure treatment. Fresh Express recalled the production lot, code G089B19, from Walmart stores in the Southeast, with Florida health officials, FDA and CDC involved. It is the only produce-animal case I found that drew a federal public health response.

11. September 10, 2016 — MIH Marketing and Sales, Beebe, Arkansas (rodent activity in meat and poultry storage). FSIS announced a recall of about 662,049 pounds of meat and poultry sold at 17 Arkansas stores after an investigator on routine surveillance found it stored under insanitary conditions, including rodent activity; samples tested positive for alkaline phosphatase, evidence of possible fecal matter. Found by the agency, not a customer.

12. December 9, 2013 — Yauk’s Specialty Meats, Windsor, Colorado (rodent activity in production and storage). FSIS announced a recall of about 90,000 pounds of meat and poultry, expanded twice that week, after a food safety assessment found product made under insanitary conditions, including rodent activity in the production, storage and retail areas. Found by the agency.

13. February 12, 2009 — Peanut Corporation of America, Plainview, Texas (dead rodents, rodent excrement, bird feathers). The Texas Department of State Health Services ordered the recall of everything the plant had ever shipped after inspectors found the filth in a crawl space above production and an air handler pulling debris from it into the plant. The plant had operated unlicensed and uninspected since 2005. Texas acted on its own authority over an immediate and serious threat to human life or health, apart from the Salmonella findings that later sent PCA’s owner to prison.

What the list shows

  • Consumers find the animals; inspectors find the infestations. Every whole-animal case here started with a customer, usually holding a phone. Every warehouse case started with an inspector.
  • The animal hides in the database. Set aside Gold Star, where FDA wrote the notice. In the four other FDA cases since 2024 (Dr. Praeger’s, PCC, Lundberg, Nortera), the animal appeared only in the Enforcement Report, weeks after the recall began; the company or store notice, where there was one, said “pest” or “foreign material.” Mezzetta makes five: the mouse is on TikTok, not in the notice.
  • Most animals in produce never trigger a recall at all. A 2019 University of Illinois review in Science of the Total Environment counted 40 incidents from 2003 to 2018 of wild vertebrates found by customers in prepackaged produce: 21 amphibians, 9 reptiles, 7 mammals and 3 birds, and noted that they rarely draw a serious food-safety response. Two examples: in 2016 Western Family told a Utah woman who found a snake’s head in canned green beans it had “issued a recall to wholesalers”; I can find no FDA record of it. In 2010 Pictsweet’s insurer denied liability to a Houston mother who found a reptile head in frozen green beans, calling it a frog, not a snake. No recall.

None of these is an outbreak. Nobody died of a mouse in a jar. They matter because they show how the recall system talks to the public when the hazard is filth rather than a pathogen: late, in a database, in language that avoids the noun. Tell people what was in the food and where it went.