A tiny intestinal parasite called cyclospora has sickened more than 11,000 Americans across 41 states since May, in what public health experts are calling a record-setting outbreak of foodborne illness. The culprit, according to the FDA, is contaminated iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico and shipped nationwide by Taylor Farms, one of the country’s largest produce distributors. The parasite causes debilitating diarrhea that can linger for weeks, leaving survivors like Jessica Mallard exhausted and weak long after the worst symptoms pass. Public health officials say the scale of this outbreak is unprecedented, and they point to a troubling erosion of the government’s ability to detect, track, and prevent such crises before they reach American dinner tables.

Susan Mayne, who led the FDA’s food-safety department from 2015 to 2023 and now teaches at the Yale School of Public Health, said she has never seen anything like it. The outbreak arrives at a moment when the agencies responsible for keeping the food supply safe have been hollowed out by deep staffing cuts under President Trump’s second term. The FDA has lost roughly 20 percent of its workforce, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is down about a quarter of its staff. The team of CDC scientists dedicated to tracking foodborne parasites has been reduced from eleven to just three. A national advisory committee that guided both the FDA and USDA on preventing microbial contamination has been disbanded entirely, along with a group that convened regularly with Mexican officials to coordinate cross-border food safety efforts.

Perhaps most alarmingly, FoodNet, the early-warning surveillance system operated jointly by the FDA, CDC, and USDA, once tracked eight dangerous pathogens but now actively monitors only two: salmonella and E. coli. Reporting on others, including cyclospora, was made optional last summer. That means health officials may be flying blind precisely when an outbreak like this one takes off. A traceability rule passed by Congress back in 2011 could have helped investigators follow contaminated produce from store shelves back to the exact field where it grew, but its implementation has been pushed off until 2028. Without it, tracing outbreaks to their source remains maddeningly slow, if not impossible.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told reporters last week that criticism of the administration’s food safety programs is unwarranted, insisting there have been no cuts to core surveillance work and that reductions to FoodNet targeted only redundant programs. Mayne flatly rejects that characterization, saying the cuts are real and their consequences are playing out right now in clinics and emergency rooms across dozens of states. Her advice for consumers hoping to protect themselves in the meantime is blunt: skip the bagged salads, where even small amounts of contamination can spread across an entire package before anyone takes a bite.