It is hard to keep up with the fast moving story.

The headlines this week put Taco Bell at the center of the Cyclospora story, and there is a real thread there. Credit to the Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun, who broke the news that federal and state health officials are investigating whether Taco Bell restaurants played a role in the outbreak. What set it off wasn’t an agency announcement: Detroit-area Taco Bell locations quietly posted signs that they couldn’t sell lettuce, cilantro-onion, pico de gallo, and guacamole “due to a nationwide recall” — a recall that doesn’t publicly exist. Sun is careful about the limits, and so am I: some of the sick reported eating at Taco Bell, and plenty didn’t, which tells you the chain is not the sole source of this thing. No grower, no supplier, and no Taco Bell ingredient has been named by the CDC or FDA.

Here is the part getting lost in the noise: this appears to not be one outbreak. The CDC now says as much in its own words, describing a large multistate outbreak across Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky — the lettuce-and-salad-greens track Michigan has been pointing at — while separately tracking multiple additional clusters. And those other clusters point somewhere else entirely. Back on July 7, CNN obtained a CDC email showing the FDA’s Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation network running traceback on cilantro, white and green onions, and cucumbers for a different set of cases — in Illinois, New York City, New York State, Pennsylvania, and Texas — that appear to be linked to Mexican-style restaurants, a grocery chain, and a catered event. Different states, different foods, different points of sale. The FDA’s own outbreak table now lists several distinct investigations running at once, each with the product not yet identified and traceback initiated. 

And that single number moved this week — hard. I spend a lot of time on this blog holding the CDC’s feet to the fire, so let me do the opposite for once. On Tuesday the agency issued a formal Health Alert Network advisory and revised its count from the 843 confirmed cases it was reporting late last week to 1,645 lab-confirmed, plus more than 5,100 under investigation — nearly 7,000 people nationwide, across 34 states, with 141 hospitalized and no deaths. The CDC put the scale in plain language: 1,645 confirmed is substantially higher than the 249 cases reported nationally over the same stretch last year. Michigan alone has now confirmed 3,309. For weeks the distance between what the states were counting and what Atlanta was publishing was the whole story; this week the agency finally revised upward, pushed the alert to every clinician and lab in the country, and named the outbreak. That is what a functioning surveillance system is supposed to do. Credit where it’s due.

And credit to the reporters who wouldn’t let it go. Beyond Sun’s work at the Post, NBC News’ Erika Edwards has been on this outbreak for weeks — chasing the state-by-state counts the federal dashboard wasn’t capturing and putting the surveillance gap in front of a national audience while the CDC’s number still read 843. Her colleague Aria Bendix reported last year that the CDC had quietly dropped Cyclospora from FoodNet — the decision that set this whole counting mess in motion. Good beat reporting isn’t glamorous; it’s showing up, day after day, on a story about a parasite most people would rather not read about over breakfast, and making sure the families getting sick actually get counted. Sun and Edwards did that.

None of this means the problem is solved. The only reason the states had to lead is that the CDC made Cyclosporareporting optional on July 1, 2025, and the federal count spent this outbreak playing catch-up from behind. The CDC is updating its state map as cases come in, and for once it is moving faster than it was a week ago. But the honest headline isn’t “Taco Bell did it.” It’s that a fractured food-safety system is now chasing several Cyclospora outbreaks at once — and the people getting sick deserve to have every one of them counted, traced, and named.

Somewhere north of 4,000 people are sick with Cyclospora this summer, and the agency that is supposed to track them says it can confirm 843. That is not a rounding error. That is the whole story.

State health departments, tallied by NBC News as of July 13, put the national count above 4,000 across more than 30 states. Michigan alone reports more than 2,600 cases — a state that in a normal year sees about 50. Ohio, New York, Illinois, and North Carolina are among the hardest hit. Meanwhile the CDC’s own surveillance page lists 843 laboratory-confirmed, domestically acquired cases in 31 states as of July 9, with 86 hospitalized, no deaths, and another 1,500-plus cases it says still require further analysis. The agency insists it has no evidence of a single, multistate outbreak tying these illnesses together.

There is a reason the federal number and the real number have come unmoored. On July 1, 2025, FoodNet — the CDC’s foodborne-illness surveillance backbone — made Cyclospora reporting optional, cutting the pathogens states are required to track down to two: Salmonella and Shiga toxin–producing E. coli. States like Michigan kept counting. Plenty didn’t. So when the biggest wave of this parasite in years arrived, the country’s early-warning system was running with the lights half off. Michigan has already flagged salad greens among the likely culprits; the CDC and FDA still say they can’t name a vehicle.

Which raises a fair question: how big is this, really, measured against the outbreaks we actually managed to count? Here is every prior U.S. Cyclospora outbreak that crossed 500 known sick — still a short list, ranked by size.

  1. 2019 — 2,408 sick — imported fresh basil, Mexico. The 2,408 domestically acquired, lab-confirmed casesreported to the CDC in 2019 were the largest peak-season total since Cyclospora became nationally notifiable in 1999. It carries an asterisk, though — and it’s the same asterisk hanging over 2026. Only about 10 percent of those cases were ever tied to the confirmed vehicle: fresh basil distributed by Siga Logistics de RL de CV of Morelos, Mexico, served through restaurants in Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Wisconsin. The rest were scattered across smaller clusters that were never pinned to a food. Even our “biggest outbreak” was, for the most part, never traced to a source.
  2. 1996 — 1,465 sick — Guatemalan raspberries. The outbreak that put Cyclospora on the map in North America: 1,465 cases across 20 states, the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces, traced to fresh raspberries imported from Guatemala. It is the textbook example — literally, in the New England Journal of Medicine — of local clusters that turned out to be one continental outbreak, and a warning that a handful of sick people at a luncheon can be the visible edge of something enormous.
  3. 1997 — 1,012 sick — Guatemalan raspberries, again. The sequel arrived the very next spring: 1,012 cases in the U.S. and Canada, same vehicle, after the growers’ voluntary risk measures failed to hold. Guatemala eventually stopped exporting raspberries to the U.S. altogether — a reminder that when we chased this parasite hard enough, we could follow it all the way back to a farm.
  4. 2020 — 701 sick — Fresh Express bagged salad. 701 laboratory-confirmed cases across 14 states — iceberg lettuce, red cabbage, and carrots out of a Fresh Express plant in Streamwood, Illinois, with 38 hospitalized. Epidemiology and traceback nailed the vehicle. I know this one well: my firm represented about 100 of those families. And note the food category — a bagged salad, exactly what Michigan is warning about right now.
  5. 2013 — 631 sick — salad mix and cilantro, Mexico. The CDC counted 631 cases across 25 states and New York City and was candid that this was more than one outbreak: restaurant illnesses in Iowa and Nebraska traced to salad mix from Taylor Farms de Mexico in Guanajuato, and a wave of Texas cases traced to fresh cilantro from Puebla. One summer, two vehicles, one number.
  6. 2015 — 546 sick — cilantro from Puebla, Mexico. 546 cases across 31 states; the mid-summer snapshot that circulated at 495 climbed to 546 by the time the season closed. Clusters in Texas, Wisconsin, and Georgia were tied to Puebla cilantro — a source the FDA had already flagged in 2013 and 2014 and eventually put under import alert. The vehicle for the cases outside those clusters was never identified.
  7. 2018 — 511 sick — salad served at a fast-food chain. 511 cases across 16 states linked to salad mix distributed to McDonald’s restaurants across the Midwest — one of two outbreaks that summer, the other being 250 sick from prepackaged vegetable trays, which fell just short of this list.

Notice what that list is, and what it isn’t. Seven outbreaks in three decades cleared 500 counted cases, and four of the seven were leafy greens or herbs — bagged salad in 2020 and 2018, cilantro in 2015 and 2013 — with raspberries and basil sitting at the top. The 2026 outbreak has already blown past every one of them on the states’ own numbers, with Michigan pointing squarely at salad greens, and the federal government is telling you it sees 843 illnesses and no connection between them.Behind every one of those numbers is a person who spent weeks on the bathroom floor because of something a rinse under the tap was never going to fix. The parasite didn’t get harder to count this year. We decided to stop counting it. 

Michigan finally said the word. On Monday its Department of Health and Human Services became the first health department in the country to name a suspect in the Cyclospora outbreak tearing through the summer produce aisle: lettuce and salad greens. It named no grower, no supplier and no brand, and it did not rule other foods out — but after more than a thousand patient interviews, chief medical executive Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian said lettuce is the product that keeps surfacing. In Ohio, the other epicenter, local officials in Lorain County had already been pointing at bagged lettuce, even as the Ohio Department of Health’s official line held at “no common source identified.” Everyone else — every other state, the FDA, the CDC in Atlanta — is still staring at a blank column: no advisory, no recall, no named food.

Which brings us to the numbers, and to a warning that has to come with them. Ask three sources how many Americans have Cyclospora right now and you get three answers, none of them wrong and none of them final. NBC’s running tally, built by calling one state health department after another, passed 4,000 cases as of July 13. The CDC, which counts a case only after it is laboratory-confirmed and cleared of travel, puts the number at 843. ABC News, tallying two days earlier, landed at 2,944. Same parasite, same week — and more than three thousand cases of daylight between the low figure and the high one.

That gap is not carelessness. State health departments report on rolling counts and looser working definitions, and they do it fast, because they are the ones fielding the phone calls; the CDC confirms slowly and conservatively, case by case, which is why its number always lags. Both are doing their jobs, just answering different questions. And under all of it sits the decision, effective July 1, 2025, to drop Cyclospora from the short list of pathogens states are required to hunt for — leaving Salmonella and E. coli as the only two that still get the full treatment.

Here is where the misery actually sits, as best anyone can say this week. Michigan carries the bulk of it, with the Department of Health and Human Services counting 2,640 cases and 44 hospitalizations across 55 counties and Detroit, in a state that logs about fifty in an entire normal year. New York is at 470 statewide, with New York City alone accounting for 372. Ohio has climbed to somewhere between 361 and nearly 400 — the spread between its own official count and a local one — with 46 hospitalized and more than three hundred of those cases in the single county around Toledo. Then the shelf drops off: North Carolina at 205, Illinois at 141, Florida above 100, Indiana at 72, Texas at 48 with five hospitalized, and California somewhere between one and ten. Another eleven states — Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin — turn up on the CDC’s list of reporting states with no public number attached to them at all.

Take every one of those figures as true when the page loaded and maybe not by dinner. Michigan added more than a thousand cases in three days. Because the counts start on different dates and rest on different definitions, they cannot honestly be stacked into one clean national total — anyone who hands you a single exact number for the whole country is selling a precision that does not exist. Ohio proves the point inside its own borders, where the state count and a local count differ by nearly forty. What can be said is the direction, and the direction is up, faster than last year, which itself ran to roughly 2,700 cases nationally.

Even the state count depends on who is doing the counting: the CDC lists 31 states with confirmed, domestic cases, a Nexstar review found 39 as of July 13, and USA Today counted cases in all but eight — about 42. The gap is all threshold — the federal tally takes only lab-confirmed cases reported up its own chain, while a broader sweep adds probable and travel-related cases and the states still stuck in the lag, so 31 is the floor, not the ceiling.

None of these numbers agree, and the reason is not that the parasite is mysterious. Cyclospora hides in leafy greens and berries, drags on for a month of explosive, relapsing illness, and slips past the routine stool panel — all well understood. The numbers disagree because we decided, as a matter of policy, to watch less carefully, and now we act surprised that we cannot see. Michigan managed to name lettuce anyway. You cannot manage what you have chosen not to measure — and behind every mismatched tick in every one of these tallies is a real person who spent weeks in the bathroom while the agencies sorted out whether their case counted yet. I have represented enough of them since 1993 to know the count is never just a number.

See downloadable PDF with hyperlinks to sources.

The numbers, state by state, as of July 14, 2026 — reported by health departments and the national press. Treat them as a snapshot of a moving target, not a settled ledger:

StateReported casesAs ofSource
Michigan  🥬 lettuce named2,640  (44 hosp.)Jul 13MDHHS
New York470 statewide (NYC 372)Jul 9NY State DOH / CBS NY
Ohio  · lettuce (local officials)361–397  (46 hosp.; Lucas Co. 306)Jul 13Ohio DOH / WOSU & CNN
North Carolina205Jul 10NC DHHS / NBC-TODAY
Illinois141Jul 2026Illinois DPH / NBC-TODAY
Florida100+Jul 10Florida DOH / ABC News
Indiana72Jul 2026Indiana DOH / NBC-TODAY
Texas48  (5 hosp.)May 1–Jul 6Texas DSHS / NBC-TODAY
California1–10Jul 10CDC / ABC News tally
AK · CO · CT · GA · LA · MA · NJ · PA · TN · VA · WIReporting cases; count not individually released2026 seasonCDC surveillance list
NATIONAL — state tally4,000+Jul 13NBC News / TODAY
NATIONAL — CDC confirmed843  (+1,500 review; 86 hosp.; 0 deaths)Jul 9CDC

Michigan just did something the federal government still won’t: it named a suspect – lettuce and salad greens!

As of this morning, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services counts 2,640 people sickened by Cyclospora— a state that in a normal year logs 40 to 50 cases total. That’s a year’s worth of this parasite roughly every two days. Forty-four have been hospitalized. After more than a thousand patient interviews, the state’s chief medical executive, Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, named what the epidemiology has been circling for weeks: lettuce and salad greens. Lettuce, she said, is the product that “regularly comes up during the investigation.” The state is careful — no specific grower, no supplier, no brand, and other foods aren’t ruled out. But the word is finally on the page.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, and that’s the part worth sitting with. Prepackaged bagged salad is the repeat offender in Cyclospora history. Iowa and Nebraska both formally implicated a prewashed bagged salad mix — iceberg, romaine, red cabbage, carrots — in the big multistate outbreak of 2013. Salad greens came back around in 2018. Now, in 2026, two states’ investigators are landing on the same product category all over again.

Because it isn’t just Michigan. Ohio, the other epicenter, tells a split story. The Ohio Department of Health’s official line is that no common source has been identified. But its local health officials have been less guarded. Lorain County’s epidemiology supervisor said the sheer volume of cases is already narrowing the field toward a common produce item like lettuce, and the county’s health commissioner said he suspects a common, commercially produced food — “such as bagged lettuce or lettuce on fast food.” Two epicenters, the same quiet answer.

Now look at what the federal agencies are willing to say. The CDC counts 843 domestically acquired cases since May 1 and 86 hospitalizations but frames the national picture as several separate clusters and pointedly declines to call it one outbreak. The FDA’s outbreak table carries four open Cyclospora investigations, and every one of them has the product column left blank with traceback merely “initiated.” No advisory. No recall. No named food. The states are pointing at the salad bowl while Washington stares at an empty column.

There’s a reason for that empty column, and I’ve been shouting about it since last summer. On July 1, 2025, the CDC quietly shrank FoodNet — the surveillance system that hunts for foodborne illness by calling labs instead of waiting on paperwork — from eight tracked pathogens down to two. Cyclospora was one of the six cut loose. When a parasite that used to be watched closely comes roaring back to more than 3,000 cases across Michigan and Ohio, the machinery built to see it coming is running on a fraction of its eyesight. Even former CDC Director Robert Redfield told CNN this week that gutting these programs isn’t in the country’s interest. Bagdasarian is asking for exactly the national coordination the cuts took away.

And here is the cruelty of the timing. Cyclospora has an incubation period of up to two weeks, and the illness itself can drag on for a month or more — explosive, relapsing, hollowing. By the time a sick person is interviewed about the salad they ate three weeks ago, the bag is long in a garbage, and the lot number is a memory. Perishable product, complex distribution, a two-to-six-week look-back — the traceback was always going to be hard. Cutting the surveillance that flags the outbreak early only makes it harder. The source gets a head start, and it’s measured in cases.

If you’ve had days of watery, explosive diarrhea, ask your doctor specifically for a Cyclospora test — a routine stool panel will miss it. Buy whole heads of lettuce instead of the bagged, pre-washed kind, strip the outer leaves, and wash what’s left under running water. Cook your greens when you can; heat kills this parasite where rinsing won’t. 

Michigan said the word. It’s long past time the rest of the country could see clearly enough to say it too.

Today the FDA called on the infant formula industry to do a better job guarding against contaminants that come in through their supply chains. Read that again. Called on. Not required. Not ordered. After babies stopped breathing, the agency’s move is to send a letter asking manufacturers to please keep a closer eye on where their ingredients come from.

I have spent the last year representing more than two dozen families whose infants were poisoned by powdered formula, and I know exactly what that letter is worth to them.

Start with ByHeart. Forty-eight infants were hospitalized and treated with human botulism immune globulin after being fed ByHeart Whole Nutrition formula, and when investigators went back through the records, the illnesses reached all the way to December 2023. FDA and CDC cultured Clostridium botulinum from an opened can fed to a sick baby — and then from cans that were never opened at all. That single fact should end every conversation about whether a parent did something wrong. The poison was sealed inside the product before it ever reached a kitchen counter, which is why no amount of looking or smelling would have warned a single parent.

Then came Nara Organics, a second and separate infant botulism outbreak, its formula manufactured in Europe and recalled in June. Two different brands, one pattern — and, as my clients’ cases lay out, one supply chain. The organic whole milk powder that tested positive for C. botulinum in the ByHeart outbreak was made from milk supplied by Organic West Milk and spray-dried at a Dairy Farmers of America plant in Fallon, Nevada. FDA’s own testing matched that contaminated powder to a finished can of ByHeart formula and to a sample taken from a sick baby. The very “supplier oversight” the agency is now politely requesting is the exact link in the chain that failed — and it failed long before ByHeart or Nara ever printed their names on a can.

And this is not only an American problem. Between late 2025 and early 2026, cereulide — a heat-stable toxin made by Bacillus cereus — was traced to contaminated arachidonic acid oil, an ingredient added to formula to mimic the fatty acids in breast milk. The World Health Organization counted 144 suspected and confirmed cases across ten countries. Cereulide shrugs off the heat of ordinary processing, so pasteurizing and drying the formula does not kill it. Same lesson, written in a different toxin: what goes into the can decides whether the baby is safe, and by the time it reaches the can, it is already too late.

What does the FDA actually ask for? That manufacturers understand where their ingredients originate, how they are made, what risks they carry, and whether those risks are controlled — and that they treat recalls, outbreak investigations, and import alerts as warnings instead of somebody else’s problem. All of which is true. All of which they should already be doing. And all of which the agency now admits it cannot even tell them how to accomplish, conceding there is no single validated method for controlling spore-formers in these ingredients and promising to keep talking with Codex and the international specification bodies. Talking. The response to poisoned babies is advisory, with no new testing requirement, and the verification methods are left to the discretion of the very companies whose products did the poisoning.

A letter is not a recall. A letter is not a rule. A letter does not test a drum of milk powder before it is scooped into a can that is fed to a baby. If the FDA wants to stop these outbreaks, it can require that formula ingredients be tested for these organisms before they reach the manufacturing line, and it can make that testing enforceable. Until it does, families will keep learning about supply-chain oversight the way my clients did — in a pediatric ICU, holding an infant who cannot breathe, staring at a sealed can that told them nothing was wrong.

FoodNet exists because of a hamburger. When E. coli O157:H7 in Jack in the Box burgers killed four children and sickened hundreds of people across the West in 1992-93, it laid bare just how blind we were to what was making Americans sick — and out of that reckoning came the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Networkin 1995, CDC’s active, audited, boots-on-the-ground count of foodborne illness across a slice of the country big enough to speak for all of it. Cyclospora was added to that count in 1997.

On July 1, 2025, CDC quietly cut the list of pathogens states are required to report from eight down to two. Only Salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli stayed mandatory. The other six — Campylobacter, Cyclospora, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia — became optional.

Here is what optional looks like eleven months later. According to CDC’s own surveillance page, 843 people across 32 states had been sickened by Cyclospora acquired right here at home since May 1 as of July 9, with 18 hospitalized — and another 343 infected while traveling. Now hold that federal number next to a single state’s. Michigan — which isn’t even one of the ten FoodNet sites — was reporting more than 1,500 cases on its own dashboard by July 10, nearly double CDC’s entire national count. When one state’s tally runs past the whole country’s official number, that is not a busy summer. That is a surveillance system describing the weather a week after the storm.

No confirmed source. Investigators are chasing multiple clusters at once. This is the exact scenario FoodNet was built to catch, involving the exact pathogen CDC just told ten state health departments they no longer have to report. The bug they stopped requiring anyone to count is the one now spreading through a third of the states in the union.

Real credit belongs to CIDRAP and reporter Chris Dall, who dug into what the rollback actually means instead of taking the agency’s talking points at face value. They tracked down Craig Hedberg, one of the deans of foodborne disease epidemiology, who called FoodNet “the foundation of our food safety system, and needs further investments, not restrictions.”

They also quoted veterinary public health consultant Gail Hansen, who warned that gutting a national system that pooled and coordinated data across state lines drags us back to the pre-FoodNet era, when no one could see an outbreak crossing borders until it was already everywhere. That is not alarmism. That is a description of this summer.

HHS says Salmonella and STEC stayed mandatory because they are among the top five drivers of illness, hospitalization, and death, that other CDC systems track the rest, and that trimming FoodNet lets staff “prioritize core activities.” Cyclospora is the pathogen that exposes how hollow that answer is. According to experts I have spoken to, routine stool panels miss it — a clinician has to specifically order modified acid-fast staining or PCR, and because the parasite sheds intermittently, one negative sample proves nothing. The vehicle is almost always fresh produce that was eaten and thrown out weeks before anyone got a diagnosis. You do not find a bug like that by hoping “other systems” catch it. You find it by actively counting, by auditing the labs to make sure nothing slipped through, and by comparing notes across states fast enough to spot a cluster before the trail goes cold. That is the one thing FoodNet did that nothing else does, and it is precisely the thing they made optional.

Minnesota and Maryland have said they will keep tracking all eight pathogens anyway. Good for them. But food doesn’t respect state lines, and a surveillance network is only as strong as its weakest catchment. When the federal floor drops, the coverage map turns to Swiss cheese — and outbreaks live in the holes.

Every one of those cases is a person who spent days doubled over, some of them in a hospital bed, most of them never knowing where it came from. We owe them a system that counts. The moment to invest in catching the next outbreak is not after it has already reached a third of the country. It is now, and it was yesterday.

Up to a hundred members of the Shinnecock Nation have been sick over the past two weeks, dozens of them sick enough to end up at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, and the closest thing to an official case count has come not from the health department that is supposed to keep one — but from the tribe’s own chairwoman and the two local reporters who bothered to ask.

Karina Kovac at News 12 Long Island reported that 58 patients have turned up at the hospital since the start of July with symptoms consistent with Salmonella, that the hospital notified the New York State Department of Health, and that Suffolk County’s Department of Health Services is “involved in collecting information.” That’s the county’s whole public posture: collecting information. No case count. No named source. No advisory to the people who might still eat the thing that did this.

Michael Wright at the Southampton Press did the reporting that actually tells you what happened. Shinnecock Nation Council of Trustees Chairwoman Lisa Goree confirmed roughly 60 tribe members came down with Salmonella poisoning, several were hospitalized, and as many as 100 may have been affected. Most who fell ill had attended a funeral repast on June 30 and started going down that night and the next morning. The health department took samples of what remaining food could be gathered. Nobody has confirmed the vehicle yet — one thread points to food left over from a vendor that had catered the Palm Tree Music Festival held on tribal land on June 27, another to a homemade dish a tribe member worried out loud might have had undercooked chicken. Both, neither, something else. That’s what an investigation is for.

Read Wright’s piece for the part the case counts never capture. One man described going from “something ain’t sitting right” to double over on the couch in five minutes flat, unable to move for two days except to crawl to the bathroom. A mother of three told the tribe the cramps were worse than childbirth. One woman posted from day seven that she was still fighting it. This is what a foodborne outbreak feels like from the inside, and it is why “collecting information” is not a public health response — it’s a shrug with a letterhead.

I’ve been doing this since 1993, and the pattern never changes: the real number lives with the sick, the reporters chase it down, and the agency issues a sentence that commits to nothing. When the tribe is counting its own and a hospital is quietly notifying Albany while the county says as little as it legally can, that’s not an information gap. That’s a choice. Every hour that source goes unnamed is an hour someone else can be handed the same plate.

Credit where it belongs — Karina Kovac and Michael Wright chased this while the official channels went quiet. A hundred sick people on the East End deserved at least that much, and for now the press is the only part of this that’s actually doing its job.

Two days after Florida named China Buffet on East Fowler as the source of a listeriosis outbreak, the restaurant is open again. Its manager told FOX 13 that professionals scrubbed the place — drains included — and that a health inspector cleared it to reopen. The state, for its part, says it will continue to work with the restaurant as the investigation goes on.

Here is what a deep clean does not do. It does not un-sicken the five people already in this outbreak. It does not change the fact that Florida’s own environmental swabs matched the strain of Listeria monocytogenes making people sick to surfaces inside that building. And it does not answer the question that still matters most: which food carried it. The state has not identified that yet, and anyone who ate there between April 9 and June 28 is still inside the 70-day window in which Listeria can surface.

Marler Clark is investigating the China Buffet outbreak and talking with people who got sick after eating there. When epidemiology and a matching environmental isolate line up the way they have here, these cases are provable — and the people harmed by a restaurant that regulators had warned, closed, and reopened for years deserve answers.

Frequently asked questions about Listeria

What is Listeria?

Listeria monocytogenes is a bacterium that causes listeriosis, one of the deadliest foodborne infections. It grows even at refrigerator temperatures and is especially dangerous to pregnant women, newborns, adults over 65, and people with weakened immune systems. Symptoms can appear days — or even weeks — after exposure.

What foods cause Listeria outbreaks?

Deli meats, hot dogs, soft cheeses, unpasteurized dairy, smoked fish, and pre-cut produce and melon have all been linked to Listeria. Because it grows in the cold, contamination can spread during storage.

Why is Listeria so dangerous in pregnancy?

In pregnant women Listeria can cross the placenta and cause miscarriage, stillbirth, or life-threatening infection in the newborn, even when the mother’s own symptoms are mild.

What are the symptoms of listeriosis?

Fever, muscle aches, and gastrointestinal symptoms; in invasive cases it can cause meningitis or bloodstream infection. Symptoms may not appear for up to 70 days after exposure.

Can I sue if I or my baby was harmed by Listeria?

If a contaminated food caused the infection, a product-liability claim may be available. These cases often involve serious, well-documented injuries and clear genetic links to a recalled product.

Frozen is not sterile, and organic is not a promise of safety — a bag of blueberries grown in Chile and sold under a trusted store brand has now put four people in the hospital.

Here is where things stand. The FDA and CDC, with state and local partners, are investigating a multistate outbreak of E. coli O145:H28 tied to frozen GreenWise-brand organic blueberries. As of the July 6 update, there are 12 confirmed cases, 4 hospitalizations, and no deaths across two states, concentrated in Florida with a single case in Georgia. People got sick between May 11 and June 5. It began when the Florida Department of Health flagged a cluster of O145 illnesses to the CDC on July 1; interviews pointed hard at the berries, with seven of nine people interviewed reporting frozen blueberries and five of them naming GreenWise organic berries bought at Publix. Publix pulled the product from its shelves on its own before the recall even issued.

The recall came on July 3, when Frutas y Hortalizas del Sur S.A. of San Carlos, Chile, pulled the 10-ounce bags carrying lot code 60401 and a Best By date of February 9, 2028. Those berries went to Publix stores across Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

So go check your freezer. That is not a throwaway line — the Best By date on these bags runs all the way to February 2028, which means a recalled bag can sit frozen and forgotten for a year and a half, long after this outbreak drops out of the news. Look for the 10-ounce GreenWise organic package with lot code 60401. If you find one, throw it out or take it back to Publix for a refund, and clean any surface it touched. If you dumped the berries into a freezer bag and can’t tell whether they’re part of the recall, throw them out anyway. Freezing preserves E. coli as faithfully as it preserves the fruit — the cold does not make them safe; it just buys the bacteria time.

O145 is one of the “big six” non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing strains, and it is every bit as dangerous as the O157:H7 most people have heard of. It can cause bloody diarrhea and hemolytic uremic syndrome — the kidney failure that hits children hardest. Four hospitalizations in an outbreak of twelve tells you how virulent this one is.

Marler Clark has been retained by one of the Florida families — a young boy and his grandmother who both fell ill after eating the berries. The very young and the elderly are exactly the people O145 punishes worst, and exactly the people who did nothing wrong but buy fruit at the grocery store. This is my lane, and it has been since 1993. FDA and state investigators are still working to pin down where in the supply chain — somewhere between a Chilean farm and a Florida freezer — the contamination got in. We intend to find out too.

Lena Sun at the Washington Post asked the right question this week: why don’t we know what food is spreading the Cyclospora sickening thousands of Americans? Her answer — that this parasite is one of the hardest foodborne bugs to trace, with a long lag between the tainted bite and the first symptom, a genome too large for our fingerprinting tools to fully read, and a distribution system so tangled that one supplier feeds a hundred kitchens — is all true. I’ve watched investigators chase this ghost since the Guatemalan raspberries of the 1990s. It is genuinely hard.

But there’s a harder truth underneath the hard science, and it doesn’t show up under a microscope. We don’t know what’s making people sick partly because, last year, we decided we’d rather not know. In July 2025, the CDC quietly made Cyclospora reporting optional when it scaled back FoodNet, its foodborne surveillance network. Reporting optional — in the middle of a pathogen’s peak season. That’s a choice, dressed up as bad luck.

You can see the result in the numbers that don’t add up. As of July 9, the CDC counted 843 confirmed cases. Michigan alone was sitting on more than 1,500. When a single state’s tally is nearly double the national “official” count, that’s not a mystery of biology — it’s a mystery of accounting. Sun’s own reporting puts the real figure north of 2,000 across more than 30 states, with 80-plus people hospitalized. The parasite isn’t hiding. The data is.

And let’s retire the advice pasted into every one of these stories: wash your produce. You can’t rinse your way out of this one. Cyclospora shrugs off disinfectants and lodges in the crevices of a raspberry or a sprig of cilantro where water never reaches. Sun’s article runs a photo from 1998, when the FDA blocked Guatemalan raspberry imports, and the caption says it plainly: washing may not remove the germs hidden in the fruit. The only thing that reliably kills it is heat — 158 degrees. 

Sun is right that a large outbreak, for all its misery, is the best shot investigators get at a source, because more sick people means more grocery receipts and restaurant tickets to cross-reference. But you only get that shot if you’re still counting. Make reporting optional and you don’t just lose a number on a dashboard — you lose the ability to find the farm, name the supplier, and pull the product before the next family orders the salad. You cannot trace what you refuse to count.