Comment/August 10, 2026
The Explosive Failures Fueling the Cyclospora Outbreak
We’re getting a stark reminder of what happens when you gut a public-health system
Gregg Gonsalves
Should you worry about cyclospora? Emily Oster doesn’t think so. Writing in The New York Times in July, Oster, the economist and self-appointed health guru, told readers that the nationwide spread of the cyclospora parasite, which causes watery, sometimes “explosive” diarrhea, was no grave concern. After all, she noted, the infection is treatable, rarely causes serious injury or death, and is not transmissible from person to person
All of this is true enough—and if, like Oster, you view health as a private family matter, you might draw comfort from her words. But if you think that the Trump administration’s devastating ongoing attack on public health in America is important, the cyclospora outbreak, which investigators think was caused by tainted produce, should matter very much to you
First, this is the largest outbreak of the protozoal disease since 2019, with more than 11,500 cases confirmed or under investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of late July. This doesn’t come anywhere near the prevalence of other diarrheal diseases like norovirus. But the point isn’t that cyclospora is not as bad as norovirus; it’s that our food supply shouldn’t be making us sick
Yet the federal agencies responsible for monitoring foodborne diseases, like the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC, have been decimated by staffing cuts in Trump’s second term. The FDA was already having difficulties in inspecting foreign food facilities before Trump 2.0; now, as Brian Ronholm of Consumer Reportstold the Times, these cuts have “really put [the FDA] further behind to the point where it’s virtually nonexistent.”
Meanwhile, the CDC last year gutted its food-surveillance program, cutting the number of monitored pathogens from eight to two. One of the pathogens dropped from the list? Cyclospora
The Trump administration also shut down two Department of Agriculture food-safety committees in 2025 and closed two food-safety labs, only reopening them after a public outcry. Finally, new FDA food-traceability rules, which would have dramatically expedited the search for the infectious culprit in this outbreak, have been pushed back to 2028. At the local and state levels, public-health departments are struggling to survive after multiple rounds of budget cuts by the federal government. The Associated Press reported that “the cuts are reducing the entire system to a shadow of what it once was, threatening to undermine even routine work,” let alone dealing with outbreaks that threaten our communities.
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The Trump administration’s endemic corruption is also making it impossible to trust the government’s public-health decisions. The FDA initially suggested that the culprit in the outbreak may be lettuce sold to Taco Bell restaurants by Taylor Farms, a huge national produce supplier. Taylor Farms’ produce is everywhere; as the Timesreported, the company “said it made more than 40 percent of all salad kits sold in American groceries” in 2025
Taylor Farms has been cited for food-safety violations related to previous cyclospora, E. coli, and salmonella outbreaks. It has also donated to pro-Trump super PACS, and its executives met with government officials in the White House amid the latest outbreak. Days after the meeting, the FDA pulled back and said the tests on Taylor Farms’ products were a series of false positives, while insisting that the company is still a focus of its investigations. Are these things connected? The fact that this is even a question says it all.
The conclusion that emerges from all these events is that the United States’ food-safety system is in deep trouble—and it’s just one of the many serious public-health crises we are facing, all as a result of the Trump administration’s relentless assault on the institutions that protect us
The Emily Osters of the world seem oblivious to all of this. In her Times column, Oster called for wastewater testing and investing in better risk communication, better disease surveillance, and better-funded local health departments, which makes me think she just awoke from an 18-month sleep like Rip Van Winkle and believes Joe Biden is still president and someone in the White House still cares about public health
We cannot afford to be comfortably numb, wrongheadedly certain in our own safety at this moment, but this is the gospel that Oster and her ilk preach. It is rooted in a selfishness that says no one matters outside “the family firm,” to borrow the title of one of Oster’s books. Just when we need to be thinking about the public good, we have prominent pundits telling us, in so many words, that the answer is to maximize our personal effectiveness and minimize our own anxiety about the world around us.
The cyclospora outbreak may be affecting only a few thousand people in the US right now, but basic human decency should move us to care about them. Absent that, basic self-interest should spur us to recognize that this outbreak is a harbinger of even greater danger ahead, as our public-health system starts to buckle and break, leaving all of us more vulnerable in the years to come
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Gregg Gonsalves
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