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.

Céline Gounder just laid it out more clearly than any regulator has: two infant botulism outbreaks in a single year, ByHeart and now Nara Organics, and the same organic whole milk moving through the same drying plant into both cans. Organic West Milk supplied it. Dairy Farmers of America dried it into powder. FDA has confirmed the shared pipeline. Two premium brands sold to parents as the clean, careful choice, drawing from one upstream source.

Infant formula is the most regulated food in this country. Every plant inspected every year (clearly, not often enough), every batch tested for Cronobacter and Salmonella before it ships. And it still put babies in the ICU twice in twelve months, because inspection plus the current rules don’t require anyone to look for the thing that actually sickened these children. 

I represent more than two dozen of these families. I’ve read the medical records — the constipation, the weak suck, the floppy head, the intubation. I’ve filed the complaints. And I can tell you the fix isn’t a mystery. Test the ingredients upstream, where the spores enter. Monitor the plant and milking environment. And make a company pick up the phone the moment it finds a positive — not after the batch ships, not never. Right now, a manufacturer can test its own product, find a deadly pathogen, and sit on the result as long as the lot hasn’t left the warehouse. That is legal. It should not be.

Rosa DeLauro’s Infant Formula Safety Modernization Act (H.R. 7867) does all three — C. botulinum testing, environmental monitoring, mandatory disclosure of positive results. It’s had bipartisan support since March. It has sat in committee since March. And in the time, it sat, a second outbreak arrived and Nara stayed on Target shelves until June. I support this bill without reservation, and I support the FDA’s own request for the authority to require reporting of a positive test even when the tainted formula never leaves the building.

And I haven’t waited on Congress. I wrote directly to the two men who could move this tomorrow without a single vote — an open letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who toured a formula plant and praised whole milk the same day his own agency knew whole-milk powder was the vehicle in both outbreaks; he’s met the CEOs, he hasn’t met the parents, and I asked him to fix that. And a letter to Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas, counselor to counselor, because he spent years defending an infant-formula maker against failure-to-warn claims before he held the pen at the FDA, so of all people he knows what foreseeability means. Next I’m taking it to all 535 of them the way I have before — handing out t-shirts on the Hill, because a slogan on a chest gets read when a letter on a desk does not.

But a bill in committee doesn’t hold anyone accountable, and a markup isn’t the same as a hearing. Congress should hold one — and it should invite the parents. Not the trade association, not the consultants. The mothers and fathers who watched a baby go limp after a feeding they were told was the safe choice. Let them sit at the witness table and describe what “voluntary reporting” and a 40% inspector vacancy rate feel like from a pediatric ICU. I’ll help any family who wants to be there get there.

I’ve been doing this since 1993. The details change — the pathogen, the brand, the supplier — but the pattern doesn’t: a gap everyone knew about, a warning nobody was required to act on, and children who paid for it. Gounder’s reporting closes the information gap. Congress can close the legal one. Pass the bill and hold the hearing.

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.

As of July 9, the CDC counted 843 people sickened by Cyclospora since the season opened May 1 — up from 145 just three weeks earlier. The parasite didn’t suddenly get busier. The reporting caught up, in one of the slow, lumpy bursts that pass for real-time surveillance in this country. If you were watching only the number, you’d have missed nearly 700 people while the page sat still.

Here’s what makes that maddening: the data exists. It’s just scattered across weekly tables, PDFs, and a dedicated CDC page that updates whenever it updates. To see the shape of an outbreak, you have to go find the pieces and assemble them yourself.

Someone did. A Washington genomic epidemiologist named Krisandra Allen built a clean, source-linked tracker that pulls the CDC’s own Cyclospora numbers — the national notifiable-disease tables, the historical outbreak records going back to 1990 — and turns them into something a human being can actually read. State-by-state counts. A season curve you can watch climb. Thirty years of outbreak history, with the produce named: herbs, leafy greens, berries, the usual suspects. It’s the picture the public should have had all along, made by one person on her own time.

I want to be precise about what that is and isn’t. This is not the private sector riding to the rescue of a hollowed-out agency. It’s one expert making the government’s own data legible — and her tracker runs entirely on that government feed. Cut the reporting, thin the FoodNet surveillance that already dropped six of eight pathogens last year, and her dashboard goes dark right along with the official numbers. The thing that makes it useful is the same thing that makes it fragile.

None of this is bad luck. Cyclosporiasis is seasonal and predictable — it climbs every May, peaks in summer, and rides in on fresh produce we’ve been warned about for years. We know when it’s coming. We know roughly what carries it. What we don’t have is a system that tells us fast enough to keep the next person off the list. When the count can hide 700 illnesses behind a stale number, the people in that gap aren’t statistics — they’re kids and grandparents doubled over for weeks, wondering what they ate.

I’ve been saying since 1993 that outbreaks are foreseeable, traceable, and preventable. The tools to prove it keep getting better; Allen’s tracker is proof of that. The public commitment to fund and staff the reporting underneath them keeps getting worse. You can’t genotype your way out of a surveillance system nobody’s paying for.

Go look at her tracker. Bookmark it. Then ask your representatives why it took a volunteer to make the CDC’s data readable — and what happens to all of us the day the data stops.

Want to put me out of business? Keep the numbers flowing — and staff the people who collect them.

Saturday, July 11, 2026

Four outbreaks, no confirmed source, and a national surveillance system now watching a fraction of what it did a year ago. That was the food safety week in America. A parasite most people can’t pronounce has sickened well past a thousand, a Tampa buffet was growing Listeria on its own counters, and frozen blueberries shipped up from Chile put people in the hospital. None of it was random. All of it was foreseeable. Here’s what moved.

The Cyclospora surge nobody can source — or fully count. CDC’s own numbers show 843 confirmed domestic cases since May 1, and the agency openly concedes it is aware of more than 1,500 additional cases still being sorted out — while news tallies already put the real toll past 1,700. Michigan alone is carrying close to 700 cases, roughly thirteen times a normal year, clustered around Detroit. Eighty-six hospitalized, no deaths, thirty-one states. Here’s the tell: the CDC admits states are seeing higher counts than its data reflects. When the agency counting the sick concedes it is behind the states doing the actual counting, that isn’t a data quirk. It’s a blind spot with a cause — more in a moment.

A Tampa buffet that grew its own outbreak. Florida health officials tied a listeriosis outbreak to China Buffet on East Fowler Avenue near USF — five sick, four who ate there between March and June, and environmental swabs positive for the same strain of Listeria monocytogenes making people sick. Epidemiology plus a matching isolate off the restaurant’s own surfaces is about as clean as causation gets. I wrote about it Thursday: an address with a long Dirty Dining record, and Listeria colonizes exactly where sanitation gets ignored. Ate there between April 9 and June 28? Symptoms can take up to ten weeks to surface.

Chilean blueberries and a hospital ward. Frozen GreenWise organic blueberries sold at Publix across eight Southern states were recalled July 3 after twelve people were infected with E. coli O145:H28 and four were hospitalized. The berries trace to a grower in San Carlos, Chile. Frozen fruit nobody thinks to worry about, an imported supply chain, and a pathogen that puts kids in the hospital.

Four outbreaks, and investigators can’t name the food. Beyond the blueberries, the FDA’s outbreak table is carrying a stack of investigations with no product identified: a Salmonella Oranienburg cluster, a fourteen-case E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, and two separate Cyclospora clusters — every one “traceback initiated,” every one source unknown. Four active outbreaks where the single question that matters — what food is doing this — has no answer yet.

The infant botulism cases aren’t going away. The FDA updated its advisory July 6 on the Clostridium botulinum outbreak tied to Nara Organics whole-milk powdered infant formula. These are babies. I represent families in these cases, and the timeline is the argument: botulism in powdered infant formula was flagged as a known hazard years ago. “Foreseeable” isn’t a theory here. It’s the record.

Two Salmonella recalls worth a glance. Fresh & Ready Foods pulled chicken-fillet burger products after raw breaded patties were used in place of fully cooked ones — a Salmonella risk manufactured by a swap that never should have happened. And Trafa Pharmaceutical recalled organic moringa leaf powder over possible Salmonella, one more thread in a moringa story that keeps unspooling.

And the reason so much of this stays invisible: as of July 1, 2025, the CDC’s FoodNet program made tracking Cyclospora optional, leaving states formally required to watch for just two pathogens — Salmonella and Shiga toxin–producing E. coli. The same summer a Cyclospora outbreak blows past 1,700 cases, the surveillance built to catch it has been switched off. The outbreaks are foreseeable. The blindness is a choice.

That’s the week — a parasite, a buffet, imported berries, and a surveillance system that keeps deciding it would rather not know. Every one of these was preventable, which is the whole reason to do this every Saturday. If enough of us keep pushing, maybe some weekend this column runs short for lack of material. Want to help put me out of business? Check back next Saturday.

About Bill Marler

William “Bill” Marler has spent more than thirty years as a food safety lawyer and advocate—work that began with the 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak and has never really stopped since. In the years that followed, he has represented victims in nearly every major foodborne illness outbreak in the United States. That case, and the movement it launched, is the subject of the book “Poisoned” and the Emmy Award–winning Netflix documentary of the same name. Bill’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker (“A Bug in the System”), the Seattle Times (“30 years after the deadly E. coli outbreak, a Seattle attorney still fights for food safety”), the Washington Post (“He helped make burgers safer. Now he’s fighting food poisoning again”), and many others.

Dozens of times a year, Bill speaks to industry, regulators, and universities across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, China, and Australia about a simple idea: outbreaks are preventable. He has testified before Congress on the Food Safety Modernization Act and teaches food safety at institutions including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He writes regularly about food litigation and food safety at Marler Blog, and in 2009 he founded Food Safety News, which he continues to publish.