As the summer’s cyclosporiasis outbreak wanes, food safety experts warn of trickle-down impact of federal cuts
This summer’s cyclospora outbreak led to two deaths in Michigan, tens of thousands of people becoming sick with the parasite, and millions of Americans swearing off lettuce. As of Sept. 8, 2026, there were 1,601 confirmed or probable cases of cyclosporiasis reported across Illinois, including 376 in Chicago and 164 in suburban Cook County.
Typically, health departments find out about a potential outbreak after a doctor or other healthcare provider alerts them. Depending on the pathogen, those reports may be routed to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for further investigation. That includes identifying the source of the outbreak — for the largest outbreak this summer, a Taylor Farms facility in Mexico— and containing it.
Federal, state, and local government agencies share responsibilities for food safety surveillance and outbreak monitoring.
Tracing Chicago’s cyclospora cases
In Chicago, labs and healthcare providers report cases, which go into a surveillance database, says Janna Kerins, VMD, medical director of communicable diseases at the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH).
Disease investigators reach out to every person who has been reported as potentially having cyclosporiasis. Investigators ask people about the grocery stores and restaurants they’ve frequented over the past few weeks, what they ate, and whether anyone else in the household may have been exposed.
Cyclospora cases have been identified throughout Chicago this summer, Kerins says. Generally, investigators found more cases on the North Side than the South Side. At times, more cases occurred in northwest community areas, and at other times, more cases occurred in southwest community areas. As of Sept. 2, 15 people in Chicago have been hospitalized.
According to Kerins, only 25 of Chicago’s 376 cases were confirmed as connected to the Taylor Farms outbreak. “This is partially because of where foods were distributed,” Kerins says. CDPH is investigating three restaurants that may have been the source of small clusters of other cases in the city, accounting for fewer than 25 cases total.
Because cyclospora isn’t spread from person to person, the city typically does not close food establishments linked to cyclospora cases. Instead, CDPH collects invoices to investigate the source of the contaminated ingredients.
When reached for comment, the Illinois Department of Public Health said in a statement: “IDPH is intensifying its investigation and continues to work with local, state, and federal partners to determine all possible sources of the outbreak, which is linked to contaminated produce.”
Federal cuts raise concerns
Some food safety experts see the outbreak as a warning that the national monitoring network is under-resourced. The FDA and CDC monitor pathogens to ensure a safe food supply and prevent disease outbreaks. Yet, in 2025, the Trump administration cut about 7,000 jobs from the agencies, including people who monitor outbreaks.
The FDA currently employs 16,267 people, its lowest staffing level since 2015, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. CDC staffing is at its lowest level since 2007.
Former CDC employees have been outspoken about how cuts have affected the national response. One molecular parasitologist who previously led the CDC team responsible for monitoring cyclospora has said that his team was downsized from 11 people to three.
Before 2025, a federal program called FoodNet monitored cyclospora. The program brings together resources from the CDC, FDA, Department of Agriculture, and 10 state health departments. FoodNet oversaw cyclospora monitoring from 1997 to 2025, but in 2025, the Trump administration and the CDC made the reporting of cyclospora, as well as five other pathogens, optional.
Eric Schulze, PhD, who developed policies at the FDA for emerging food and drug applications under the Obama administration, says that before the recent job cuts, the FDA was already operating with limited resources and had been requesting additional resources from Congress for decades. He says the latest cuts likely affected the response to this outbreak and will hurt the agency’s readiness to respond to future ones.
“While [food inspectors are] very talented, there’s simply not enough of them to inspect every food facility at the required frequency,” Schulze says.
With reduced federal support, the burden of ensuring food safety shifts to state and local public health departments.
“Things like CDC funding trickle down to the states, which then trickle down to us as a local health department, so these cuts kind of affect us eventually,” Kerins says. “Overall though, we’ve been pretty lucky. We work closely with the state health department on foodborne illness, and with the CDC as well, so they are both still supporting our work, both specifically for cyclospora and across [other public health] responses as well.”
However, a New York Times journalist who covers the FDA suggests that the state and local burden may increase.
“What I found in my reporting is that the Trump administration is working on a plan to actually hand off about 90% of all the food facility and farm inspections that go on in the United States over from the FDA to the states,” Christina Jewett said in a recent episode of the New York Times’ podcast “The Daily.”
Schulze, currently chief technology officer at cultured meat company Evergreen, says he’s heard whispers about those changes, but whether they will become actual policy remains to be seen.
The benefit of robust federal monitoring is that it’s standardized, Schulze says. If left up to the states, implementation of a federal standard can differ from state to state. States also vary in the level of surveillance their health departments have the capacity to conduct.
The institutional knowledge lost at the FDA will be hard to replace, Schulze says.
“I think the things that people don’t account for in this particular scenario are the immense amount of institutional knowledge that walked out the door involuntarily,” he says. “Those people with that institutional memory are the ones that help you understand how to apply the law. Those people are gone.”
Kerins says cyclosporiasis is complicated to track because it lacks whole-genome sequencing — a genetic fingerprint — that can link cases together, making investigations more difficult.
Cyclosporiasis cases are still being reported, according to the Brown Pandemic Center, but at much lower levels than at the height of summer. In the week leading up to Labor Day weekend, the U.S. had at least 937 new cases, a 2.7% increase, compared with a 7.3% increase in cases the week before. In total, more than 34,000 cases have been reported across 48 states this year — 30,000 more than the nearly 4,000 cases reported in 2025.
While the outbreak is now waning, state public health officials still recommend that people, especially those with weaker immune systems, contact their doctors if they experience ongoing diarrhea. Officials also recommend washing hands before preparing or eating food, washing produce well, and — to lower risk even more — cooking produce before eating it.
Rachel Duckett is a freelance health and science writer. A lifelong Midwesterner, she previously hosted All Things Considered at WVIK, Quad Cities NPR in Rock Island, Illinois. She has also worked at an environmental initiative out of Detroit Public Television called Great Lakes Now, covering environmental stories in the Great Lakes Basin, and as a copy editor for the Spartan Medical Research Journal in East Lansing, Michigan. She hopes to demystify research and medicine for a general audience with her writing.
A health journalist and attorney who lives in Chicago, Kimberly covers science, health and the environment as a graduate student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. She hopes to use her knowledge of public health and law to communicate complex issues to the general public.
