You Can’t Rinse Your Way Out of This Cyclospora Outbreak
Article By Bill Marler on July 11, 2026
Article Source: https://www.marlerblog.com/case-news/you-cant-rinse-your-way-out-of-this-cyclospora-outbreak/
USA Today ran a smart, useful piece this week — reported by Eduardo Cuevas and Terry Collins — asking the question a lot of people are Googling right now: is it safe to dine in or out during a Cyclospora outbreak that has sickened thousands of Americans?
When USA Today asked seven of the biggest fast-food chains in the country — Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Jersey Mike’s, Burger King, Subway, Wendy’s — what they were doing about the outbreak, every one of them said nothing. Only Chipotle answered, and its answer was a hedge: it doesn’t believe its ingredients are involved.
Investigators still haven’t found the source. Not a farm, not a grower, not a lot code, not a water source.
The Associated Press’s Mike Stobbe — who’s been covering food safety about as long as I’ve been suing over it — reported the count blowing past a thousand, and quoted Michigan’s own chief medical executive saying there is “clearly a linked outbreak happening right now.” Clearly linked. Growing. And still no name.
What to do?
Wash your produce? And here’s the problem — for this parasite, that doesn’t work. Rinsing won’t dislodge Cyclospora oocysts wedged in the crevices of a raspberry or a fold of lettuce. When the safety plan is “the customer should be more paranoid,” that isn’t a safety plan.
The real question isn’t whether it’s safe to eat a salad. It’s why, three weeks and more than 3,000 suspected cases into this thing, no one in authority can tell you where the parasite is coming from.
Part of the answer is that Cyclospora is genuinely hard to figure — you can’t culture it in a lab, most stool panels don’t test for it, and it hides on fresh produce grown where field sanitation is thin. I’ve been litigating these cases since the cilantro outbreaks and the summer of 2018, when Fresh Express salad mix and Del Monte veggie trays put people in the hospital. It’s a warm-weather produce parasite. It comes back every summer. None of this is a surprise.
But part of the answer is a choice we made. In July 2025, the CDC scaled back its FoodNet surveillance and made state reporting of Cyclospora optional. Optional — in the exact season this parasite shows up every year. Atlanta stopped requiring the data that lets you connect a case in Michigan to a case in Ohio to a lot of imported berries. And now Michigan alone is counting more than 1,500 cases, 44 of them hospitalized, while the CDC’s confirmed national number sits at 843.
You cannot trace what you decline to count. The traceback failure everyone’s writing about this week didn’t come out of nowhere. It was foreseeable — the way most of these are foreseeable, traceable and preventable.
I don’t have a clever tip for your next restaurant meal. The honest answer is that out-paranoiding the supply chain is a losing game, and it was never supposed to be your job. It’s the job of the growers who source the produce, the chains who serve it, and the agencies we fund to count the sick and follow the trail back to the field.