Woods Hill Table Salmonella Outbreak: Ten Sick, Staff and Customers Among Them, as Concord Restaurant Closes. What Investigators Have Not Yet Said.

By Bill Marler on September 17, 2026

Woods Hill Table, the farm-to-table restaurant on Commonwealth Avenue in West Concord, Massachusetts, closed on September 16, 2026 while town and state health officials investigate a cluster of Salmonella infections. As of September 17, ten people had been reported ill, both customers and restaurant employees, according to Concord Public Health Director Melanie Dineen. She said she had not heard of anyone being hospitalized. The restaurant has not said when it will reopen.

Nearly everything the public knows comes from one place: reporting by Dakota Antelman of The Concord Bridge, which obtained Dineen’s September 15 memo to the Board of Health and interviewed her. The Bridge’s first version of the story said the memo did not name the illness; the updated version, after Dineen spoke with the paper, identifies it as Salmonella. As of this writing, neither the Town of Concord nor the Massachusetts Department of Public Health has posted anything about the cluster.

What the Concord investigation has found so far

According to Dineen, the investigation began on September 8. An initial inspection of the restaurant found no priority violations, and in those early days she did not believe there was a risk to the public. Testing then turned up more cases, including one person who was carrying Salmonella without symptoms. About a week into the investigation, Dineen advised Woods Hill Table to close, and the restaurant agreed.

Her memo says state epidemiologists individually contacted every affected patron and that there is currently no ongoing risk to the general public. It also says management and staff gave officials full access for environmental sampling and employee retraining. Each staff member must have two negative test results before returning to work. Local officials believe this is most likely an isolated incident, but Dineen wrote that more testing is needed to confirm it.

Owner Kristin Canty told the Bridge in an emailed statement that the restaurant takes food safety protocols very seriously and is cooperating with state authorities. Dineen praised the management’s response, saying they are doing everything they are supposed to.

What Concord got right

When employees are among the sick, closing the kitchen and testing everyone who works in it is the right call, and requiring two negative results before anyone returns is how you keep a cluster from restarting a week after the doors reopen. The asymptomatic carrier found here is the reason that rule exists: a food handler who feels fine can still shed the bacteria. As Dineen noted, Salmonella spreads through food and from person to person.

It also matters that the restaurant cooperated, and that the health director said so publicly. In more than thirty years of foodborne illness cases, I have seen the damage done when a business fights the health department instead of working with it. That did not happen here.

What the public still does not know

1. Which serotype? Salmonella has more than two thousand serotypes. Knowing whether this is Enteritidis, Typhimurium or something rarer says a lot about where to look.

2. What dates? Neither the memo nor the Bridge story gives the dates of illness or the meal dates involved. A diner who ate there in early September and was sick but never tested has no way of knowing whether they belong in this count.

3. Who got sick first? If employees fell ill before customers, the likely explanation is an infected worker. If customers and employees fell ill together, a contaminated ingredient served to both becomes the stronger possibility. The order matters.

4. Has the state lab sequenced the isolates? Whole genome sequencing will show whether the ten cases share one strain and whether that strain matches illnesses anywhere else in the country.

5. What did the environmental sampling and food testing find? The memo says sampling was done. The results have not been released.

6. How were the patrons identified? Contacting every affected patron is good work. The public should know whether that list came from reservations and card records, and whether anyone who walked in or paid cash could have been missed.

Why “isolated” has to be proven, not assumed

A restaurant is often the last stop in a supply chain, not the first. The same contaminated ingredient that sickens diners in one dining room can sicken people in other states who have no idea they shared a supplier. The only way to rule that out is laboratory data.

Massachusetts has that data. Salmonella infections are reportable to the state Department of Public Health, and clinical labs must send isolates to the State Public Health Laboratory. A CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases study of Massachusetts surveillance reported that the state averaged about 1,200 confirmed Salmonella cases a year from 2014 through 2018, and that the state lab has reported cluster patterns to CDC’s PulseNet network since 1996, now increasingly by whole genome sequencing. DPH also posts year-to-date foodborne illness counts, currently through September 1, which is too early to show this cluster.

Dineen and the Concord Board of Health have handled this responsibly. The next step is for DPH to say publicly what the sequencing shows. If the Woods Hill Table strain matches nothing else, officials can say so with confidence. If it matches cases elsewhere, the public needs to know which ingredient and which supplier, because the risk will not have ended at a closed door in West Concord. CDC estimates that Salmonella causes about 1.35 million infections, 26,500 hospitalizations and 420 deaths in the United States every year.

If you ate at Woods Hill Table and got sick

Symptoms of salmonellosis include stomach cramps, diarrhea, fever, nausea and vomiting, and some cases are severe enough to require hospitalization. If you ate at the restaurant in September and have been ill, see a health care provider, ask for a stool test, and tell them where you ate. A positive test is what puts your case into the investigation. You can also contact the Concord Public Health Division. Anyone with symptoms should not prepare food for others until they have recovered.

Dineen’s September 15 memo went to the Board of Health, and should become public through the Board’s meeting records or the Great Meadows Public Health Collaborative, where Concord posts agendas and minutes.

Three questions about the Woods Hill Table Salmonella cluster

Why did Woods Hill Table close? Concord’s public health director advised the West Concord restaurant to close about a week into a Salmonella investigation that began September 8, after testing found additional cases. The restaurant agreed and closed September 16.

How many people are sick? Ten as of September 17, including both customers and employees, with no reported hospitalizations.

Is there a risk to the public? Town officials say there is currently no ongoing risk, and state epidemiologists have contacted each affected patron. They describe the cluster as most likely isolated but say more testing is needed to confirm it.

I will update this post when Concord or the Massachusetts Department of Public Health releases the serotype, the dates of illness, or the sequencing results.

The Packer Calls It a Supply Chain Mystery. Traceback Found the Supplier in a Day. The Field Is the Mystery, and Congress Has Barred the FDA From Enforcing the Rule That Would Record It Until 2028.

By Bill Marler on September 17, 2026

Posted in Case News

The multistate Cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico closed on September 11, 2026 with 12,883 illnesses, 570 hospitalizations and 2 deaths in 21 states. Investigators did not lose the supply chain. They followed it to the supplier within a day and lost it at the last link, the farm field and whatever water touched the lettuce there. That last link is what the federal Food Traceability Rule is built to record, and Congress has told the FDA it may not spend money enforcing that rule until July 20, 2028.

The Packer ran a thoughtful piece Thursday by Jill Dutton with Fabiola Negrón, director of food safety at Registrar Corp. Her diagnosis is sound. People remember meals poorly and weeks after the fact. Records run out a few steps back. A company can keep good internal records that never connect to its growers’ records. Produce with a short shelf life is gone before anyone can test it. On Cyclospora specifically, she said finding the product was the simpler part, and that once investigators knew the supplier, the gap was that the supplier did not know the source.

She is right. The headline, though, says the outbreak ended in a supply chain mystery, and the distinction matters for what gets fixed.

What investigators found, and how fast

The FDA and CDC announced the investigation on July 16. On July 17 the agencies said traceback had converged on a single supplier, Taylor Farms de Mexico, and the company recalled all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico. On July 19 the FDA withdrew a positive lettuce sample as a false positive, and no product sample has since tested positive. The link rests on epidemiology and traceback. In August, CDC added genotyping showing that the parasites from sick people were genetically related, which ties patients to each other and to a single source, though not to a sample of lettuce.

For fairness: Taylor Farms says it raised scientific questions about the government’s assumptions and methodology in its first call with the FDA, CDC and Michigan health officials. Neither agency has changed its conclusion. CDC’s outbreak page still states that the investigation linked the outbreak to processed iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico.

Where the trail went cold

On August 20 the FDA’s inspection moved from the processing plant to iceberg lettuce growers in Mexico. At the close, Food Safety Magazine reported that the FDA had completed inspections and sampling at the growers and the processing facility, with results pending and root cause work continuing. The FDA’s own post-outbreak page says its investigation of the Taylor Farms de Mexico outbreak goes on, along with the investigations into the other clusters this summer.

Consider also the size of the recall: all iceberg lettuce from a region of Mexico. That is my reading, not an agency finding, and a company acting out of caution would recall the same way. Still, a recall drawn around a region instead of a lot or a field is what the gap Negrón describes looks like in practice.

The rule that records the field

Section 204 of the Food Safety Modernization Act, signed in January 2011, told the FDA to propose traceability requirements for high-risk foods by January 2013. The agency missed the deadline and wrote the rule only after the Center for Food Safety sued and a court set a schedule. The final rule came out in November 2022. For foods on the Food Traceability List, which includes leafy greens, it requires key records at each step, including a traceability lot code and where the food was harvested, and it requires companies to produce those records for the FDA in a sortable electronic spreadsheet within 24 hours.

The compliance date was January 20, 2026, nearly five months before the first illness in this outbreak. In March 2025 the FDA announced a 30-month delay. In November 2025 Congress went further. Section 780 of Division B of H.R. 5371, the bill that ended the shutdown, bars the FDA from using appropriated funds to administer or enforce the rule before July 20, 2028, according to a Congressional Research Service report. A delay is an agency deciding industry needs more time. A funding prohibition leaves the agency unable to act even if it changes its mind. The Packer notes the 2028 date without explaining where it came from. Fifteen and a half years separate the statutory deadline from the first day of enforcement.

Nobody can prove after the fact that an enforced rule would have taken investigators to one field this summer. Getting investigators to the field is what the rule is designed to do, and this outbreak is the case it was written for.

The fear she describes is a cost to industry

Negrón made a point the produce industry should take to heart. Frightened shoppers do not read lot numbers. They avoid the whole category until the news fades. The Packer’s own reporting found that this outbreak hurt grocery foot traffic well beyond the produce aisle. Traceability draws a line around the problem, and without that line fear prices the entire category. Growers, packers and retailers who did nothing wrong paid for that this summer.

Some of the associations speaking for those same retailers and distributors asked Congress to wait on the rule, as their own lobbying disclosures show. I wrote about those filings in August. Western Growers told the Guardian that it supports the rule, so industry is not of one mind, and that is worth remembering.

The bigger mystery

The mystery The Packer’s headline promises is real, but it sits elsewhere. CDC now counts 19,883 laboratory-confirmed, domestically acquired _Cyclospora_ cases from May 1 through August 31. Subtract the 12,883 in the lettuce outbreak and 7,000 confirmed cases remain with no food named. Those investigations never got far enough to hit a supply chain wall. On September 15 CDC stopped updating that page weekly. Over the coming months, epidemiologists and I will be working to learn where those people were infected.

Questions readers are asking

Did investigators find the source of the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak?

They found the supplier, Taylor Farms de Mexico, within a day of announcing the investigation. As of the September 11 close, the FDA had not named a farm or a root cause, and sample results from the Mexican growers were pending.

Would the Food Traceability Rule have helped?

The rule requires harvest location and lot codes to travel with leafy greens and requires records within 24 hours. Enforcement is barred until July 20, 2028.

Test the system

Negrón’s advice to companies is to test the traceability system rather than keep a plan on paper. Congress should take the same advice. The country had a system, with a written rule and a compliance date, and Congress took the money away before anyone could test it. Eleven consumer, public health and labor organizations have asked Congress not to push the rule back further. The fastest way to shrink the next supply chain mystery is to let the FDA enforce the rule it already wrote.

Fifteen Letters, and the First From Both Chambers: Twenty-Five Democrats Tell USDA to Stop Closing Its Cyclospora Lab at Beltsville. CDC Has Stopped Counting Weekly. The Answers Are Not In, and There Is Still No Hearing.

By Bill Marler on September 17, 2026

Posted in Case News

On September 17, Representative Rosa DeLauro and twenty-four other Democrats in the House and Senate wrote to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asking USDA to stop closing the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center and to put its Cyclospora research back to work. It is the fifteenth congressional letter on the 2026 outbreak, the second to USDA in four days, and the first signed by members of both chambers. DeLauro’s announcement names seven lawmakers; the letter itself carries twenty-five signatures, seventeen from the House and eight from the Senate, including Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. That makes six House letters, eight Senate letters and one from both, all from Democrats. I last wrote about the letters on September 15. As of this afternoon I still cannot find a published answer to any of them.

The letter says the outbreak has sickened nearly 20,000 people. CDC’s case data put it at 19,883 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases for the May 1 to August 31 season, with 1,064 hospitalizations and two deaths in forty-nine states and the District of Columbia, as of September 15. CDC says that was its last weekly update; the page will now change only periodically. On September 11 CDC declared the outbreak over with 12,883 illnesses tied to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. That leaves exactly 7,000 confirmed cases this season with no food named. FDA says its investigation continues. Where those 7,000 people picked up the parasite is a research question, and research is what this letter is about.

What the fifteenth letter adds

The fourteenth letter, from Representative Debbie Dingell and nine House colleagues, asked whether USDA would seek the congressional approval its reorganization requires. The fifteenth goes after the Department’s explanation. USDA told Politico, in a statement Reuters carried, that Congress did not fund two of the three Beltsville Cyclospora projects for fiscal 2026 and that none of the research has been disrupted. The members write that Congress ended that funding on technical advice from USDA that the researchers would stay at Beltsville and that the Department would keep their expertise without ending its Cyclospora work. That is the members’ account. USDA has not published one.

On the third project, which is still funded, the letter relies on Politico’s reporting that the scientists declined orders to move to Iowa, leaving no dedicated USDA staff to study the parasite. It asks five questions: whether all the Beltsville Cyclospora staff have declined to relocate and whether anyone has been hired to replace them; how many other projects will lose scientists; how USDA will keep the research uninterrupted; where the work will go and whether the receiving labs can handle it; and whether USDA will ship highly pathogenic organisms across the country, and how safely.

The members write that USDA has spent more than $170 million upgrading and repairing Beltsville since 2016, including a $32 million renovation of its food safety laboratory finished in 2022, and that the Agricultural Research Service receives more than $1.8 billion a year. They ask USDA to stop the closure and halt the reorganization. Unlike the Dingell letter, which asked for answers within two weeks, this one sets no date. It asks for a timely response.

Why it matters

For two months I have written that the letters asked about surveillance cuts, political influence and the recall, and that none of the first thirteen asked how to keep the next outbreak from happening. Two letters in four days now do. There is no whole genome sequencing for this parasite. CDC links cases by genotyping, and used it in this outbreak to show the parasites making people sick were genetically related. That science does not maintain itself.

In July, Secretary Rollins told a Hill audience that cyclosporiasis is an FDA issue, not a USDA one. On outbreak response that is mostly right. On research it is not, and two letters have now gone to the department that holds the bench.

Here is the whole list, updated. The column on the right is still the one to read.

Date	Who wrote, and to whom	What was asked for	Deadline and status
Jul 14	Sen. Amy Klobuchar (MN) to CDC and FDA	Restore FoodNet, FERN, inspection staffing and public health grants	None set. No answer found
Jul 15	Rep. Greg Stanton (AZ) to Sec. Kennedy	Six questions: who ordered the surveillance change, what funding was cut, how many staff lost	Aug 3. Passed, no answer found
Jul 16	Sen. Jon Ossoff (GA) to Sec. Kennedy	Three questions on restoring Cyclosporatracking and the state of the investigation	72 hours, Jul 19. Passed, no answer found
Jul 17	Reps. Dingell, McDonald Rivet, Scholten and Tlaib (MI) to CDC and FDA	Ten questions from inside the outbreak, including whether the agencies agree with Michigan on the source	Jul 24. Passed, no answer found
Jul 20	Rep. Josh Gottheimer (NJ) to CDC	Restore FoodNet to mandatory active surveillance, plus two bills	None set. No answer found
Jul 20	Sens. Blumenthal (CT) and Booker (NJ) to CDC	A briefing on how the outbreak was tracked and whether staffing cuts caused delay	Undated. No answer found
Jul 24	Sen. Ossoff, second letter, to Sec. Kennedy	The same three questions, plus the fact that the first letter went unanswered	None set. No answer found
Jul 27	Rep. Robert Garcia (CA), Oversight Ranking Member, to Bruce Taylor	Five categories of documents and five written questions, including facility records back to 2013	Aug 10. Passed, no production found
Jul 28	Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) to CDC and FDA	Six questions on the collapse of the federal laboratory network	Jul 31. Passed, no answer found
Jul 30	Sen. Blumenthal, PSI Ranking Member, to FDA	All records, including every communication with the White House and with the company	Aug 13. Passed, no answer found
Jul 30	Sen. Blumenthal, PSI Ranking Member, to Bruce Taylor	All records, including every communication with the White House and with FDA	Aug 13. Passed, no production found
Jul 30	Reps. Veasey, Dingell and Sewell with about fifty colleagues, to CDC and FDA	Transparency and immediate action to identify the source	None set. No answer found
Aug 13	Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA) to Sec. Kennedy	Nine questions on the retracted test, the White House call, what the outbreak has cost, and which states still report	Aug 27. Passed, no answer found
Sep 14	Rep. Dingell (MI) and nine House colleagues to Sec. Rollins, USDA	Six questions on the shelved Cyclosporaresearch, staff losses at the research service, and whether USDA will seek congressional approval for its reorganization	Two weeks from receipt, about Sep 28. Pending
Sep 17	Rep. Rosa DeLauro (CT), Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY) and 23 other Democrats in both chambers to Sec. Rollins, USDA	Five questions on the Beltsville Cyclospora staff, the relocation plan and moving pathogens; stop closing Beltsville and halt the reorganization	None set. Sent Sep 17

I believe that is every letter and I am not certain it is. I have had to add letters after publishing before. No answer found means exactly that and nothing more; an agency can answer a member privately, and neither side has to publish it. If you have an answer to any of these, send it and I will correct this post.

The fix is in the next funding bill

USDA blames the fiscal 2026 appropriations law; the members say Congress acted on USDA’s own advice. Either way, the repair runs through one place. The November 2025 law that ended the shutdown carries both the Beltsville funding decision and Section 780, which bars FDA from spending money to administer or enforce the food traceability rule before July 20, 2028. Fiscal 2027 begins October 1, and the letter says Democrats are ready to build on existing Cyclospora research in the final funding agreement. Congress can restore the research and lift the traceability delay in that bill. Neither fix needs a letter. The Beltsville reversal does not even need Congress; the members write that it is wholly within the Secretary’s power to do immediately.

Still no hearing

Eight dated deadlines have passed without a published answer, the last on August 27. The Dingell letter’s two weeks run out around September 28, and the DeLauro letter set none. No committee has noticed a hearing. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which held a hearing on Cyclospora in imported raspberries in July 1998, can issue a subpoena; Senator Blumenthal wrote as its ranking member, and a ranking member cannot subpoena alone. The House Oversight majority can adopt Representative Garcia’s document request as the committee’s own. The Agriculture Committees oversee USDA, and the appropriators fund all three agencies. Twenty-five members signed the newest letter, and none of them holds a gavel. Every one of those tools belongs to the majority.

CDC has stopped counting weekly. Fifteen letters have put them in writing, and not one has a published answer. If a letter will not put anyone in a chair, a subpoena to a hearing will.

CDC Now Counts 19,883 Confirmed Cyclospora Illnesses and 1,064 Hospitalizations. Exactly 7,000 of Them Are Attributed to Nothing at All, and FDA Has Finished Its Inspections in Mexico Without Reading the Samples.

By Bill Marler on September 17, 2026

Posted in Case News

Someone asked me today what is going on with Cyclospora. Here is where things are as of a few moments ago.

CDC updated its Cyclospora case-data page on September 15, 2026, and said it was the last weekly one. It now reports 19,883 laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis acquired in this country since May 1, 1,064 hospitalizations, two deaths and cases in forty-nine states plus the District of Columbia, against 1,180 for the whole of last season. The federal outbreak linked to Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce closed on September 11 at 12,883 illnesses, 570 hospitalizations, two deaths and twenty-one states, with a last illness onset of August 17. The fifty state health departments now report 33,556 cases this season.

Cyclosporiasis is an intestinal illness caused by Cyclospora cayetanensis, a microscopic parasite spread through human feces in contaminated food or water. Washing does not reliably remove it, and chlorine does not kill it.

The unattributed pile is now exactly 7,000, and it shrank for a reason that is not an answer.

19,883 confirmed nationally, 12,883 in the outbreak, 7,000 left over. A week ago that number was 8,137. It fell by 1,137, and not one of those 1,137 people was tied to a food anyone has named. CDC’s final outbreak update added 1,425 people to the Taylor Farms count and a twenty-first state, Virginia, on the day it closed the file. The national series grew by 288 in the same stretch. The pile got smaller because CDC finished assigning interviews it already had, not because an investigation found anything.

Roughly two in three confirmed illnesses now carry a federal attribution of any kind, up from three in five a week ago. Measured against everything CDC says it is aware of this season, 36,242 cases, it is about one in three. Measured against the 33,556 the states themselves report, it is closer to two in five.

FDA’s inspections in Mexico are over, and the samples have not been read.

This is the part of the FDA advisory worth reading twice. On August 20, FDA said it had moved from the Taylor Farms de Mexico processing plant to the iceberg lettuce growers in the fields, which is where a waterborne parasite gets onto lettuce. The September 11 update says those onsite inspections and that sample collection, conducted with Mexican officials, have ended, and that the samples are pending analysis. The fieldwork is finished. The laboratory work is not, and nobody outside the agency knows how many samples were taken, from which fields, or when a result will be published.

FDA says its investigation remains open, and it has opened a second page for what comes after: a meeting with senior Mexican officials the week of September 8 on a prevention framework, a letter to industry asking for collaboration, and a promised update to its Cyclospora action plan. Every one of those is worth doing. Not one of them is a finding.

Whatever those samples show, a negative is the expected result.

Taylor Farms is already arguing the answer. Its Cyclospora information hub, last modified September 1, says epidemiologic evidence can point investigators toward a potential source but cannot confirm that a specific product caused illness, that confirmation requires a positive laboratory test of the product, and that the company’s own testing — roughly two thousand samples taken in central Mexico since May — has returned no positives. FDA answered that argument six years ago, in writing, to a different salad company. In the warning letter of October 20, 2020 that followed the Fresh Express bagged salad outbreak, FDA declared the product adulterated on the strength of epidemiologic and traceback evidence, with no positive product sample anywhere in the file. It then told the company exactly what its own negative results were worth: this parasite is not present in high numbers or spread evenly through a lot, and it is not uncommon to see many negatives even when contamination has occurred.

The science under that sentence is not in dispute. When Canadian federal scientists verified FDA’s own detection method, leafy greens spiked with ten oocysts tested positive thirty percent of the time. Seven in ten known-contaminated samples read clean. FDA’s 2013 assessment of this same plant put the infectious dose at ten to a hundred oocysts. A serving capable of putting someone in a hospital sits below the level at which a single sample reliably reports anything. The company’s own trade association tells consumers the same thing, that the absence of a positive sample does not mean the epidemiologic and traceback findings were wrong.

The company did not apply that standard to itself either. It recalled in July 2026 with no positive test in existence, and it suspended shipments from the same plant in 2013 with no positive test in existence. A sample count without a noun attached — two thousand samples of what, taken where, by what method, from which lots — is not a finding. I went through all of it here. The samples FDA carried out of Mexico this summer should be read the same way when they come back: a negative tells you what one 25-gram grab did not catch, and nothing about what 12,883 people ate.

FDA has open files on 312 of those 7,000 people.

FDA’s active investigation table, updated September 16, carries four Cyclospora investigations besides the lettuce outbreak. Together they account for 312 people.

Ref #	Posted	Cases	Outbreak status	Product linked	FDA steps taken
1392	Jul 22	234	Ongoing	Not yet identified	Traceback, sampling
1385	Jul 8	38	Ongoing	Not yet identified	Traceback, sampling
1398	Aug 5	22	Ongoing	Not yet identified	Traceback, sampling
1384	Jul 8	18	Ended	Not yet identified	Traceback only
All four		312		None

FDA active investigation table, as posted September 16, 2026. Case counts are FDA’s. Reference 1390, the iceberg lettuce outbreak, is listed separately as ended with the investigation still open.

Against 7,000 confirmed illnesses with no attributed source, 312 is about one in twenty-two. Reference 1392 is 234 people, posted July 22, with traceback and sampling initiated and the inspection column still blank eight weeks on. Reference 1384 has ended, and it ended without a food ever being named. All four read Not Yet Identified.

Seven counters have gone quiet in three weeks.

CDC says it will stop updating weekly because recent infections have significantly declined, and will post periodically instead. Michigan moved to the first Thursday of each month and stands at 14,718 cases and 366 hospitalizations until October 1. Indiana called September 2 its final update until the official close of the outbreak, at 2,104. Virginia ended its weekly table on September 1 at 242. North Carolina moved to every other week on September 8 and does not report again until September 29. West Virginia closed its outbreak investigation outright on September 11, at 315 cases and 21 hospitalizations. Ohio has published no statewide number since 5,452 on August 13, thirty-five days ago.

CDC’s own page says illnesses from this season will keep arriving as they are identified, and that because of the unprecedented number of cases this year, illnesses from earlier in the season may keep coming in as well. The counting continues. The publishing has stopped.

What moved this week, and what did not.

North Carolina added eight cases, to 963 for the year and 32 hospitalizations, and its dashboard still says the increase there does not appear to be associated with the outbreak in other states involving Taco Bell, and that its patients have reported eating parsley and cilantro more often than a population-wide baseline would predict. Wake County holds 527 of them. Virginia’s last column changed for a different reason: the state says it is now in the multistate outbreak after verification of traceback data from CDC and FDA. Nothing else in the table moved, because almost nobody published.

Underneath the confirmed 19,883, CDC has 9,765 laboratory-confirmed cases still being sorted into domestic or travel-acquired and at least 6,594 more that are not laboratory confirmed or are awaiting an interview, which is how it reaches 36,242. Travel-associated cases, counted separately, are 2,078 with 74 hospitalizations. The median onset is still July 8, the latest still August 30.

Here is where all fifty states stand.

The Lettuce column is whether FDA has confirmed the recalled product reached that state. The last column is whether anybody has tied that state’s illnesses to Taylor Farms at all. Thirty-one states received the lettuce. Twenty-one are in the federal outbreak. Every count is a floor.

State	2026 cases	As of	CDC Aug 27	All of 2025	Lettuce	Taylor Farms
Michigan	14,718	Sep 3	4,846	50	Yes	Linked
Ohio	5,452	Aug 13	2,679	76	Yes	Linked
Missouri	2,152	Aug 23	1,010	none reported	Yes	Linked
Indiana	2,104	Sep 2	823	27	Yes	Linked
Illinois	1,437	Aug 18	278	301	Yes	Linked
North Carolina	963	Sep 15	2	300	Yes	Linked
New York	939	Aug 17	0	694	Yes	Unknown
Kansas	829	Aug 26	331	29	Yes	Linked
Kentucky	819	Aug 12	329	45	Yes	Linked
Oklahoma	556	Aug 25	241	41	Yes	Linked
Florida	450	Aug 15	0	210	Yes	Unknown
Iowa	327	Aug 20	130	64	Yes	Linked
Texas	315	Aug 11	20	512	Yes	Linked
West Virginia	315	Sep 11	160	8	Yes	Linked
Arkansas	287	Aug 25	82	13	Yes	Linked
Wisconsin	284	Aug 26	0	65	Yes	Unknown
Virginia	242	Aug 31	0	115	Yes	Linked
Nebraska	218	Aug 6	199	51	Yes	Linked
Pennsylvania	214	Aug 11	244	not notifiable	Yes	Linked
Colorado	150	Jul 17	0	205	No	Unknown
Massachusetts	147	Aug 5	18	74	Yes	Linked
New Hampshire	94	Aug 25	42	7	Yes	Linked
Alabama	85	Aug 3	0	19	Yes	Unknown
Washington	76	Aug 28	0	not available	May have	Travel link
Maryland	69	Jul 17	0	123	Yes	No link found
New Jersey	46	Jul 11	0	180	Yes	Unknown
Tennessee	44	Jul 16	5	38	Yes	Linked
California	41	Jul 14	0	not available	May have	Unknown
Minnesota	41	Jul 17	0	none reported	No	Unknown
Connecticut	35	Jul 17	0	41	Yes	Unknown
Maine	27	Aug 7	16	4	Yes	Linked
Oregon	23	Jul 24	0	not available	No	Travel link
Arizona	19	Jul 17	0	49	No	Unknown
Georgia	11	Jul 17	3	116	Yes	Linked
Mississippi	7	Jul 22	0	not notifiable	Yes	Unknown
Hawaii	6	Aug 26	0	not available	No	No link found
Alaska	5	Jul 16	0	6	No	Unknown
Rhode Island	4	Jul 17	0	6	May have	No link found
South Dakota	3	Jul 16	0	3	May have	Unknown
Louisiana	1	Jul 17	0	99	Yes	Unknown
Utah	1	Jul 17	0	37	No	No link found
Delaware	none published	—	0	1	May have	Unknown
Idaho	none published	—	0	not notifiable	No	Unknown
Montana	none published	—	0	8	No	Unknown
Nevada	none published	—	0	not notifiable	No	Unknown
New Mexico	none published	—	0	9	No	No link found
North Dakota	none published	—	0	4	May have	Unknown
South Carolina	none published	—	0	45	Yes	Unknown
Vermont	none published	—	0	3	May have	Unknown
Wyoming	none published	—	0	0	No	Unknown
All fifty states	33,556		11,458		31	21

Counts as published by each state health department, compiled from the linked sources, as of September 17, 2026. Forty-one counted rows sum to 33,556; nine states publish no number. The CDC column is the last per-state outbreak split CDC published, on August 27, and sums to 11,458; CDC’s final September 11 update raised the outbreak to 12,883 without publishing a new state-by-state breakdown. State totals and CDC totals count different things and are not directly comparable.

What the season leaves behind.

Two people are dead. 1,064 have been hospitalized. The states willing to print a number printed 33,556 of them. The largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history is closed at 12,883, and 7,000 confirmed illnesses this summer still have no attributed source, with an open federal file on 312 of them. FDA’s inspectors have left the fields in Mexico and the samples they carried out have not been read. CDC has stopped publishing weekly. The lot-level traceability records that would let anyone walk this lettuce back to a field in days rather than weeks are not required until July 2028. Every count above is a floor.

FDA Watched 438 Grocery Store Delis: 84% Slipped on Holding Food Safely, 62% on Handwashing

By Bill Marler on September 17, 2026

Posted in Case News

The Food and Drug Administration sent its retail food specialists into 438 randomly selected grocery store delis between October 2019 and December 2022. In 84 percent of them, specialists saw at least one failure to hold food at a safe time or temperature. In 61.9 percent, an employee did not wash hands when or how the FDA Food Code requires. Those are the two headline findings of the agency’s technical report on foodborne illness risk factors in retail food store delis, published in August 2026 and reported this week by Food Safety News.

I read reports like this one differently than most people do. I represented the family of a man who died in the NetCost Market deli outbreak, and dozens of people in the Boar’s Head deli meat outbreak. I have sat with those families.

Why this report is personal

The NetCost outbreak ran from April 2021 to September 2022, inside the same window FDA was observing delis. CDC counted 16 people sick in six states. Of the 14 with information, 13 were hospitalized. One woman lost her pregnancy, and one death was reported, from Maryland. My client, a New Yorker, was one of the 16, and his Listeria was a whole genome sequencing match to the outbreak strain. He fell ill after eating deli products bought at two NetCost locations and died nearly a year later, too late to be included in CDC’s death count. Official outbreak numbers are a floor, not a ceiling.

New York officials found the outbreak strain in environmental samples from a NetCost deli in Brooklyn, in open packages of mortadella and ham sliced there, and in salami a sick person bought at a NetCost deli on Staten Island. The Brooklyn deli closed, was deep-cleaned and reopened after testing came back clean. In September 2022, the outbreak strain was found in that same deli again. CDC never identified a single deli or food as the source and concluded that a contaminated food likely carried the strain into delis in several states.

Two years later came Boar’s Head. CDC said in August 2024 that it had become the largest listeriosis outbreak since the 2011 Jensen Farms cantaloupe outbreak, in which I represented the families of all 33 people who died. CDC’s final count was 61 people sick in 19 states, 60 hospitalized and 10 dead. The people I represented in that outbreak included families of people who died.

Neither outbreak appears in FDA’s report, which names no deli and counts no illnesses. But when I read that 39.3 percent of delis did not properly clean and sanitize food-contact surfaces, I think of a Brooklyn deli where the outbreak strain turned up again after a deep cleaning.

What FDA measured

The visits were unannounced but voluntary and non-regulatory, and averaged about 101 minutes. Specialists scored ten Food Code practices grouped under four risk factors: poor personal hygiene, contaminated equipment, improper holding time and temperature, and inadequate cooking. A deli was marked out of compliance on a practice if a specialist saw it fail even once. FDA is careful to say that does not mean the practice failed every time.

This is the second of three rounds in FDA’s current Retail Food Risk Factor Study. The baseline round ran from 2015 to 2016, and the third runs from October 2026 through September 2027. FDA says it will not report trends until the third round is complete.

What FDA found

Holding food at the right time and temperature was the worst-controlled risk factor. Cold holding failed in 58.9 percent of delis, hot holding in 44.0 percent, and cooling in 41.9 percent of the delis where cooling could be observed. In 35.8 percent, refrigerated ready-to-eat food was not properly date-marked or discarded within seven days.

Personal hygiene came next at 61.9 percent, all of it from handwashing. In 55.7 percent of delis, someone failed to wash at a required time, and in 27.6 percent, someone washed improperly. Bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food, by contrast, turned up in only 1.4 percent.

Contaminated equipment was found in 52.7 percent of delis. Food-contact surfaces were not properly cleaned and sanitized in 39.3 percent, and food was not protected from cross-contamination in 31.1 percent.

Cooking was the best-controlled risk factor, out of compliance in 9.3 percent of the 344 delis where it was observed. Only 37 of the 438 delis, 8.4 percent, had no failures on any of the ten practices. The median deli had three.

Why these failures matter for Listeria

FDA notes that most deli food is ready-to-eat and gets no cooking step to kill pathogens before it is eaten. The report does not test food for bacteria or count illnesses, and it does not tie any failure to any outbreak. Still, the practices that failed most often, including cold holding, sanitizing food-contact surfaces, and date-marking and discarding ready-to-eat food, are the practices that matter most for Listeria monocytogenes, which CDC warns can grow on food kept in the refrigerator. After the 2024 outbreak, CDC told businesses to follow USDA-FSIS best practices for controlling Listeria in deli areas.

What made delis safer

The strongest predictor of good performance was a well-developed food safety management system, meaning written procedures, training and monitoring. Delis with no such system averaged 4.37 failures. Delis with a well-developed, documented system averaged 1.95. FDA’s model estimates about 19 percent fewer failures for each one-point improvement on its four-point management scale.

Certified food protection managers helped, mostly by building those systems. Delis where a certified manager was the person in charge had an average management score of 2.87, compared with 2.27 where no certified manager was employed. Certification alone was not a significant predictor once management systems were taken into account.

Local rules mattered too. Delis in jurisdictions that required food handler training averaged 2.42 failures, compared with 3.19 where training was not required. Jurisdictions that graded establishments or required inspection results to be posted publicly also had fewer failures. Chain delis, which made up 95.2 percent of the sample, were far more likely to have well-developed management systems (47.6 percent) than single-store delis (9.5 percent).

One finding cuts the other way. More than three-quarters of the delis were in jurisdictions enrolled in FDA’s voluntary retail Program Standards, yet 67.9 percent of those jurisdictions did not meet Standard 1, the basic regulatory foundation. FDA’s supplemental analysis also found fewer failures in delis located in jurisdictions that were not enrolled. The report states that result without explaining it.

What the report cannot tell us

Participation was voluntary, delis under legal notice were excluded, and no deli is named, so the numbers may understate the problem. FDA did not measure whether food came from a safe source. The report is also internally inconsistent in one spot: it first attributes the holding failures to cold holding and cooling, then to cold holding and hot holding.

Timing is the larger problem. FDA announced the 2015-2016 deli report in May 2021. The 2019-2022 report arrived in August 2026, nearly four years after its data collection ended. Every observation in it predates the 2024 outbreak, so it says nothing about how delis changed afterward.

What should happen now

Deli operators do not need to wait for the next round. FDA released companion calls to action for industry and regulators that focus on using management systems to improve handwashing. The report’s own data point the same direction: write the procedures down, train to them, and check that they are followed.

State and local officials can require food handler training and public posting of inspection results, both associated with fewer failures in this study. FDA can report the third round far faster than it reported the first two. A trend line that arrives years late cannot help the families of people who get sick in the meantime.

People at higher risk, including pregnant women, adults 65 and older and anyone with a weakened immune system, should follow CDC’s advice to avoid deli meat or reheat it to an internal temperature of 165°F or until steaming hot.

Quick answers

What did FDA’s 2019-2022 deli study find? In 438 grocery store delis, 84 percent had at least one lapse in holding food at a safe time or temperature, and 61.9 percent had at least one handwashing lapse. Cooking was the best-controlled risk factor.

Is deli meat safe to eat? For most healthy people, illness from deli meat is uncommon. For pregnant women, adults 65 and older and people with weakened immune systems, CDC advises avoiding deli meat or heating it until steaming hot, because Listeria can cause severe illness.

What makes a deli safer? In FDA’s data, the biggest difference came from written food safety procedures, staff training and routine monitoring, backed by a certified food protection manager in charge.

Salmonella and Eggs in 2026: More Than 750 Sick in the U.S. and Europe, Two Dead in England, and Fixes Nobody Has to Invent

By Bill Marler on September 17, 2026

Posted in Case News

Eggs contaminated with Salmonella have sickened more than 750 people in the United States and Europe so far this year, in at least eleven outbreaks, and two people in England have died. The causes are ones public health has understood for decades: bacteria inside the egg, raw or lightly cooked egg dishes in restaurants and delis, gaps in who has to follow the rules, and too much time between the first warning sign and the recall. The fixes are known, too.

The United States: three outbreaks, three very different farms

Midwest Poultry Services, Texas. The largest U.S. egg outbreak of the year was traced to Midwest Poultry Services, L.P. CDC counted 134 people sick in 18 states, 34 of them hospitalized and none dead, with illnesses starting between November 21, 2025, and August 12, 2026. FDA inspectors collected environmental samples at the company’s Texas operation, and three matched the outbreak strain of Salmonella Enteritidis by whole genome sequencing. The recall of more than 1.5 million dozen eggs on July 22 followed the company’s own third-party testing, which found the outbreak strain and was shared with FDA the day before. PulseNet flagged the cluster in April. Of the 134 people sickened, 99 fell ill between April 1 and the day before the recall, nearly three of every four cases. FDA said in July that Midwest Poultry did not account for all of the illnesses and has not named another source. CDC declared the outbreak over on September 3.

Happy Hens, Ramona, California. In San Diego County, an outbreak first tied to raw-egg mayonnaise at the deli in Ramona Family Naturals Market was traced to Happy Hens, a pasture-raised egg farm in Ramona. The count stands at 23 sick and seven hospitalized: 18 connected to the deli and five who got sick from the eggs themselves. FDA sampled the farm’s hen houses beginning August 17 and found Salmonella in two of seven, and genetic testing matched it to the people who were sick. State health officials recommended a voluntary recall on September 4. The farm recalled on September 8, and the public learned of the recall from the California Department of Public Health on September 11. A Happy Hens co-owner said in an Instagram video that regulators had fined the farm for selling checked, or cracked, eggs to the deli. Marler Clark represents seven people sickened in this outbreak.

Leaping Bear Farm, Reading, Vermont. Leaping Bear Farm recalled eggs in cartons dated June 1 through September 5 after state health and agriculture officials found Salmonella in eggs and environmental samples from the farm. Vermont has linked 14 illnesses to the outbreak, and officials say related cases have turned up in other states, without saying where or how many. The eggs were sold at farmers markets and other retailers. About 1,800 hens are involved, a number that matters for reasons explained below.

England: 549 sick, two dead, and imported eggs under investigation

The UK Health Security Agency is investigating three clusters of Salmonella Enteritidis that evidence suggests may be linked to imported eggs. As of September 7, England had 322 confirmed cases and one death in the largest cluster (t5.9411), 186 cases in the second (t0.24068), and 41 cases and one death in the third (t5.9765), for 549 in all. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have reported more. In the largest cluster, patients range from infants to 90-year-olds, and 44 of the 176 with information available were hospitalized. Investigators have tied 47 cases to 11 businesses, mainly small cafés, restaurants and takeaways, and at least 24 of those people ate dishes containing egg. Two large importers are being investigated. The Food Standards Agency says there is no evidence implicating UK-produced eggs. The latest figures suggest new cases are slowing.

The largest cluster is not only British. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reports 341 confirmed cases in Europe between May 2025 and August 2026, about 61 percent in the UK and 31 percent in the Netherlands, with others in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany.

France: the same Polish egg group, again

Between May and July, France recorded four outbreaks of Salmonella Enteritidis ST11 tied to homemade mayonnaise, chocolate mousse and tiramisu. Eggs collected at patients’ homes carried strains matching the people who were sick. A French alert to the European Union’s rapid alert system counted 16 sick and four hospitalized. The European Food Safety Authority traced the eggs in all four outbreaks to two packing centres and three laying-hen farms in a single Polish food group, the same farms implicated in the multinational egg outbreak that reached 18 European countries between 2016 and 2020. One implicated batch was laid in a henhouse that had tested negative in December 2025 and again in January, April and June 2026. France suspended sale of the suspect eggs at the end of July. EFSA said the repeat findings suggest persistent contamination, or reintroduction, upstream in the production chain.

Spain: a tortilla left on the counter

In Eibar, 29 people got sick, nine of them hospitalized, after eating Spanish tortillas at one establishment on August 9. Inspectors cited insufficient cooking, tortillas stored at room temperature, weak egg traceability and cleaning, and the risk of cross-contamination. The eggs came from a farm in Aragon. Authorities ordered them withdrawn from other establishments and barred the distributor from marketing until it could show a working traceability and recall plan. Eggs and egg products were behind 131 of Spain’s 250 Salmonella outbreaks in 2024.

Why do eggs keep making people sick?

The bacteria are inside the egg. Salmonella Enteritidis can infect a hen’s ovaries and end up inside the egg before the shell forms. A clean shell is no guarantee, and neither is a clean barn test, as the Polish henhouse shows.

Raw and lightly cooked dishes turn one bad egg into an outbreak. Mayonnaise, mousse, tiramisu, runny eggs at a café and a tortilla left out all day appear on this year’s list.

The rules have holes. FDA’s Egg Safety Rule applies to farms with 3,000 or more laying hens, so Leaping Bear’s roughly 1,800 hens fall below the line. The rule requires prevention plans, environmental testing and refrigeration. It does not require vaccination.

Detection outruns action. Months passed between the PulseNet signal and the Texas recall. More than two weeks passed between San Diego County publicly naming Happy Hens and the state’s recall recommendation, then four more days to a recall and three more before the public was told. In Europe, a Polish group tied to an outbreak that ran from 2016 to 2020 is back.

What would prevent the next egg outbreak?

Vaccinate laying hens. The UK’s British Lion and Laid in Britain schemes vaccinate hens against Salmonella, and the Food Standards Agency considers those eggs very low risk, low enough that it says infants, pregnant people and older adults can eat them raw or lightly cooked. The United States should require vaccination, at a minimum for flocks that supply retail and food service.

Close the small-flock gap. A farm selling into grocery stores, delis and co-ops should meet the same prevention and testing rules as a large one, whatever the size of the flock.

Require pasteurized eggs for raw and lightly cooked food-service dishes. California already requires food facilities to use pasteurized eggs in foods such as mayonnaise under Health and Safety Code section 114012. Every state should. The FSA tells caterers who cannot verify where an egg came from to cook the dish thoroughly or use pasteurized egg.

Act on the epidemiology. When sequencing, patient interviews and traceback point to a farm, name the farm and get the eggs off the shelf. Waiting for an egg to test positive costs weeks, and FDA has mandatory recall authority under the Food Safety Modernization Act for firms that stall.

Finish traceability. Shell eggs are on FDA’s Food Traceability List under section 204 of that law, but compliance has been pushed back to 2028. Spain’s order barring a distributor until it proved it could trace and recall is worth copying.

Hold repeat sources accountable. When the same farms turn up in outbreaks a decade apart, pulling batches is not enough. EFSA’s call to find the root cause at the breeding and production level should be answered, and importers and buyers should demand the results.

Treat every egg as if it could be contaminated. Refrigerate eggs, throw out cracked or dirty ones, keep raw egg away from ready-to-eat food, and cook eggs until the yolks and whites are firm, especially for young children, older adults, pregnant women and anyone with a weakened immune system.

Salmonella in eggs is not a new problem, and none of these fixes is new. What 2026 shows is what happens when the tools we already have are used only halfway.

The Cache and Box Elder Salmonella Outbreak Is Still a Mystery. Bear River Health Department Has Ruled Out Idaho Broccoli Sprouts. Here Are the Questions It Still Needs to Answer in Public.

By Bill Marler on September 17, 2026

Posted in Case News

Sixteen days after the Bear River Health Department announced 21 confirmed Salmonella cases in Cache and Box Elder Counties, nobody outside the department knows what made those people sick, when they got sick, or whether more people have fallen ill since. The one new fact is a negative one. The department told the Box Elder News Journal this week that whole-genome sequencing shows the northern Utah strain is not the strain in the multistate outbreak tied to broccoli sprouts from Evergreen Fresh Sprouts of Idaho, and that the two groups of illnesses are not related. The department is also knocking down claims circulating online that tie the outbreak to infant formula.

That is useful. It is also the only thing the public has been told since September 1.

What the department has said, and where it said it

The department’s September 1 media release is still the only statement about this outbreak on its website, and the page has not been modified since shortly after noon that day. It reports 21 confirmed cases in the two counties and says the department is investigating the source and working to limit further spread. The rest is a general primer on Salmonella: how it spreads, the symptoms, who is at risk, and how to prevent it. As we noted when the release came out, it gives no serotype, no onset dates, no hospitalizations, no ages, and no locations within the counties.

The sprout correction came through a story by staff writer Nelson Phillips, published September 16 behind the paper’s subscriber wall. The department deserves credit for answering the question when asked. The answer belongs on the department’s own page as well, dated and linkable, where people searching for news of the outbreak will find it.

Why people connected the two outbreaks

The confusion was understandable. On September 9, CDC and FDA announced a Salmonella Bovismorbificans outbreak linked to broccoli sprouts produced by Evergreen Fresh Sprouts, LLC of Moyie Springs, Idaho. CDC’s outbreak notice counts 22 sick people in Idaho, Montana, Utah and Washington, with illnesses starting between July 7 and August 26, 2026, and Evergreen began recalling its broccoli sprouts on September 4. A multistate outbreak with a Utah case, announced a week after a northern Utah outbreak with no named source, invited people to link the two.

Sequencing is what settles that kind of question, and according to the department it has settled this one. Nothing about that changes the sprout outbreak itself. Anyone still holding recalled Evergreen broccoli sprouts with use-by dates of 9/7, 9/9, 9/11, 9/14 or 9/16 should throw them out or return them.

A question answered in private invites rumor in public

Rumors about an outbreak do not start from nothing. They grow in the gap between an announcement that people are sick and the next word on why. Twenty-one confirmed cases is more than half of what this three-county district reports in a normal year, and because most Salmonella infections are never diagnosed, the number of people actually ill in Cache Valley is far higher than 21. People who read that number will look for answers wherever they can find them.

The sequencing statement also tells us something the department has not said outright: it has laboratory results on the local isolates detailed enough to compare against the sprout strain. At a minimum, that means it knows the serotype. Publishing the serotype identifies no patient, and it lets anyone check the local outbreak against national outbreak notices.

Questions the Bear River Health Department should answer publicly

Some of these may not have answers yet. Where that is true, saying so is itself an answer.

How many confirmed cases are there now? The public count has been 21 since September 1, and CDC notes it usually takes three to four weeks to determine whether a sick person is part of an outbreak.
What serotype of Salmonella is it?
Do the local isolates match one another? Is this one strain from one source, or several unrelated infections that happen to overlap in time?
When did people get sick? What are the earliest and most recent onset dates, and is anyone still getting sick?
How many people have been hospitalized, and has anyone died?
How old are the patients? How many are children, and are any infants? That answers the formula question more directly than any denial.
Where do the patients live? How are the cases split between Cache and Box Elder Counties, and are they clustered in particular communities?
What do the sick people have in common? A restaurant, an event, a grocery store, a food product, a water system, or contact with animals such as backyard poultry or livestock?
What has been ruled out besides the Evergreen sprouts? And what exactly was the infant formula claim the department is correcting?
Has anything been sampled? Food, water or an environmental site, and have any results come back?
Does the strain match illnesses anywhere else? Has the Utah Department of Health and Human Services or CDC found the same strain in other parts of Utah or in other states, and are FDA or USDA involved?
When will the next update come, and where will it be posted?

What to do if you live in Cache or Box Elder County

Until a source is named, the practical advice is the department’s own. Anyone with diarrhea, fever, stomach cramps, nausea or vomiting should contact a health care provider, especially if symptoms are severe or not improving, and should not prepare food for others while sick. Ask for a stool test. A laboratory-confirmed case gives investigators an isolate to sequence and compare, and that is how a source gets found.

Report your illness through Utah’s I Got Sick portal or call the Bear River Health Department at 435-792-6525. When an investigator calls, answer every question about what you ate and where you went in the days before you got sick. Wash your hands with soap and water after using the restroom, changing diapers and handling animals, and before preparing or eating food. CDC’s Salmonella prevention page covers the rest.

What comes next

When the Bear River Health Department releases an updated count, a serotype, an onset date range or a source, there will be a new post here. The standard is the one we set on September 1: publish what is known as it is settled, and name the source when it is found.

Questions people are asking

Is the Cache and Box Elder County Salmonella outbreak linked to broccoli sprouts? No, according to the Bear River Health Department. It told the Box Elder News Journal that whole-genome sequencing shows its strain differs from the one in the Evergreen Fresh Sprouts outbreak.

What is causing the Salmonella outbreak in Cache and Box Elder Counties? As of September 17, 2026, no source has been identified or announced.

Is the outbreak linked to infant formula? The department has not named infant formula or any other product, and it is correcting claims online that tied the outbreak to formula.

Previous coverage: Twenty-One Confirmed Salmonella Cases in Cache and Box Elder Counties. Utah’s Bear River Health Department Has Not Yet Named a Source. (September 1, 2026)

FDA Lists Sixteen Open Outbreak Investigations. Eight Name No Food, Two Are Still Marked Active After FDA Said It Was Done, and a Romaine E. coli File Closed Without Telling Anyone Who Grew the Lettuce

By Bill Marler on September 16, 2026

Posted in Case News

FDA’s CORE outbreak investigations table is the closest thing the public has to a running list of the foodborne illness outbreaks the agency is working. When I checked it this morning, September 16, it still carried a September 10 date. It lists sixteen active investigations. Add the case counts on the table to the counts on the outbreak pages it links to, and those sixteen files account for 14,246 illnesses and two deaths.

Almost all of that is one file. The Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce Cyclospora outbreak, which CDC declared over on September 11, closed at 12,883 sick in 21 states, at least 570 hospitalized, and two deaths in Michigan. The other fifteen files carry 1,363 people. Here is what the table says about them, and what it does not.

The sixteen open files

Ref.	Posted	Pathogen	Food	Sick	Status	On site
1411	Sept 10	SalmonellaBovismorbificans	Sprouts (broccoli)	22*	Ongoing	No
1403	Aug 26	SalmonellaNewport	Not identified	109	Ongoing	No
1394	Aug 19	E. coli (3 strains) &Salmonella Agona	Alfalfa sprouts	55*	Ongoing	Yes
1402	Aug 12	Salmonella I 4,[5],12:i:-	Not identified	43	Ongoing	Yes
1398	Aug 5	Cyclospora	Not identified	22	Ongoing	No
1392	July 22	Cyclospora	Not identified	231	Ongoing	No
1395	July 22	Salmonella Javiana	Jalapeño peppers	431*	Ongoing	No
1379	July 22	Listeria monocytogenes	Not identified	9	Ongoing	Yes
1390	July 15	Cyclospora	Iceberg lettuce	12,883*	Ongoing	Yes
1385	July 8	Cyclospora	Not identified	38	Ongoing	No
1384	July 8	Cyclospora	Not identified	18	Ended	No
1387	July 8	SalmonellaOranienburg	Not identified	99	Ongoing	Yes
1389	July 6	E. coli O145:H28	Frozen blueberries	17*	Ongoing	Yes
1383	June 13	Clostridium botulinum	Powdered infant formula	4*	Ended	Yes
1378	June 10	SalmonellaEnteritidis	Eggs	134*	Ended	Yes
1358	Jan 14	SalmonellaTyphimurium, Newport, Richmond	Moringa leaf powder	131*	Ended	Yes

Table: FDA CORE active investigations as of the September 10 update. Status is FDA’s outbreak status column; every row is carried as an Active investigation. On site means the FDA Inspection Initiated column is checked. Counts marked * are rows where FDA’s table says See Advisory; the number comes from the linked outbreak page as of its latest update: Evergreen sprouts, alfalfa sprouts, jalapeños, iceberg lettuce (CDC final), frozen blueberries, infant formula, eggs and moringa.

I have written separately about the Nara formula outbreak and the frozen blueberries, and this post does not repeat that work.

Half the table names no food

Eight of the sixteen rows list the product as Not Yet Identified. Those eight files carry 569 sick people.

The largest is Salmonella Newport, ref #1403. It went up on August 26 with 84 cases, reached 97 a week later, and stood at 109 on September 10. The row shows traceback initiated and nothing else: no recall, no on-site inspection, no sampling. The advice link on that row goes to FDA’s general safe food handling page. I could find no CDC notice for it.

Two other unnamed files have had more work and still have no answer. Ref #1379, a Listeria monocytogenescluster of nine people posted July 22, shows traceback, inspection and sampling all initiated, and eight weeks later no food is named. Ref #1392, a Cyclospora file posted the same day, has grown to 231.

To be fair to the agency, FDA’s own page says plainly that investigations that do not produce specific steps for consumers may never pin down a source. Plenty of outbreaks end without a food. A blank product column is not proof that anyone is sitting on anything. But 109 people in a Newport outbreak with only traceback checked is a file the public should hear more about.

Closed, and told us nothing: romaine, ref #1382

This is the entire public row for the romaine E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, from the Closed Investigations section of the same page:

FDA column	Entry for ref #1382
Date posted	July 1, 2026
Pathogen	E. coli O157:H7
Product linked to illnesses	Romaine lettuce
Total case count	14
Investigation status	Closed
Outbreak status	Ended (link to general handling advice)
Recall initiated	Blank
Traceback initiated	✔
On-site inspection initiated	Blank
Sample collection and analysis initiated	Blank

Fourteen people were sick. FDA posted the file July 1 with no food named and named romaine only when it closed the file on September 10. The What’s New note on the table says CDC had declared the outbreak over as of July 29, that epidemiologic and traceback data pointed to romaine as the likely source, and that by the time investigators got there the lettuce was past its shelf life. The row shows traceback and nothing more: no inspection, no sampling, no recall, no advisory. The advice link is the general handling page. No grower. No processor. I wrote about the closure the day it happened.

The page makes a promise. It says that when a cause or contributing factors are identified that could help prevent the next outbreak, FDA commits to publishing a summary of the findings. On the 2026 closed list, three files have their reference numbers linked to a summary document, including the May moringa outbreak, #1377. Ref #1382 has no summary, at least not yet. Neither does the 89-person 2024 romaine outbreak, ref #1280, which shows traceback, inspection and sampling all initiated and closed with no firm named on the table.

If traceback led to one processor and one grower, FDA should say who they are. Lettuce past its shelf life is a reason there is nothing left to recall. It is not a reason there is nothing left to learn.

Marked Active after FDA said it was done

Four rows read Ended in the outbreak column and Active in the investigation column: #1384, #1383, #1378 and #1358.

For one of them the pairing makes sense. On the Nara infant formula file, #1383, CDC declared the outbreak over August 27, and FDA says its root cause investigation is still going. The same reasoning covers the iceberg lettuce file, which the table still carries as Ongoing; FDA says it is still working out how the lettuce became contaminated.

For two others, FDA’s own advisories say the opposite of the table. The January moringa advisory, #1358, opens by saying CDC declared the outbreak over and FDA’s investigation has closed. The egg advisory, #1378, updated September 3, says FDA’s outbreak investigation is complete. The table was updated a week after that, on September 10, and still lists both as Active. The last one, Cyclospora #1384, has 18 cases, an Ended outbreak, traceback only, and no advisory, so there is no way to tell from the outside where it stands.

The egg outbreak closed at 134 sick

The egg closure deserves its own paragraph, because the final numbers are well above what was reported in July. FDA’s final update counts 134 people from 18 states, 34 hospitalized and no deaths, with illnesses starting between November 21, 2025, and August 12, 2026. On July 24 the count was 98 people from 17 states with 26 hospitalized. Of the 54 people with information, 46 reported eating eggs.

The evidence got stronger, too. FDA inspected Midwest Poultry Services, L.P. in Texas and collected environmental samples. Three were positive for Salmonella and matched the outbreak strain by whole genome sequencing. The company recalled white and brown cage-free shell eggs from its Texas farms on July 22, with sell-by or best-by dates of July 20 through August 17.

Two things remain open. FDA confirmed distribution of the recalled eggs in six states, AR, LA, MS, NM, OK and TX, while sick people lived in 18. The July update also said Midwest Poultry did not account for all of the illnesses and that investigators were looking for other sources. The final update calls the Texas eggs a likely source and does not say whether any other source was found.

The table is behind its own pages

The iceberg lettuce row still says the outbreak is Ongoing. CDC ended it September 11, the day after the table was last touched. FDA has since updated the iceberg advisory and posted a post-outbreak response page. The table has not moved in six days. For the largest outbreak on it, that is the difference between a list that tells the public where things stand and one that has to be checked against three other pages.

What would fix it

None of this takes a new law. When an advisory says FDA’s investigation is complete, move the row to Closed the same day. When a file closes with a food named, post the summary the page already promises, and name the firms traceback identified. When an unnamed file passes 100 sick, tell the public at least the states and the onset dates.

Sixteen open files. Eight with no food named. Two carried as Active after FDA said it was finished. And one romaine closure with fourteen sick people and nothing else. The table is the best public tool we have for following FDA’s outbreak work. It should say what the agency knows.

Federal Cuts and the 2026 Cyclospora Outbreak: The Case for Public Health Capacity Is Strong, and Five Numbers in It Still Need Answers

By Bill Marler on September 15, 2026

Posted in Case News

On September 9, 2026, the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan good-government group, published a brief arguing that federal workforce and funding cuts have diminished the country’s public health capacity. It used this summer’s record Cyclospora outbreak as one of its case studies. I think the argument is right. I also think several of the numbers in it, and in coverage that has already picked it up, need a clearer source before the rest of us repeat them. Below is what the brief says, why the argument holds, and five open questions I would like answered.

Cyclosporiasis is an intestinal illness caused by the parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, most often spread in the United States through contaminated fresh produce. It causes prolonged watery diarrhea, and it is easily missed unless a laboratory specifically tests for it.

What the Partnership brief says

The brief reports that the CDC workforce in February 2026 was 26.7 percent smaller than in September 2024, and that FDA’s was 21.6 percent smaller. CDC project grant funding fell 71.9 percent from fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2025. Because about 80 percent of CDC’s domestic funding goes to state and local health departments, federal cuts become county cuts. On Cyclospora, citing CNN and NPR reporting from July, it says reductions in lab funding and in CDC parasitic-disease staff contributed to the agency’s largest outbreak reporting delay in 15 years.

There is no longer written report behind the brief. It draws on the Partnership’s interactive site, The Cost of Cutting American Science, and a longer companion page, The Unraveling of Public Science, which carries data through December 2025.

Why I think the argument is right

I used to be in the beef business with E. coli. What FSIS has done since the 1993 Jack in the Box outbreak took that practice away, thankfully. Hamburger E. coli cases, which ran from Jack in the Box to the 2002 ConAgra recall, are now near zero for my firm. That is what sustained federal inspection capacity buys, and it is the best thing to happen in food safety in my lifetime.

This summer shows the other side. CDC’s September 1 update counted 18,445 lab-confirmed, domestically acquired Cyclospora cases from May 1 through August 31, with 990 hospitalizations and two deaths in 49 states and the District of Columbia. The same stretch of 2025 produced 1,180. The federal outbreak tied to recalled iceberg lettuce stood at 11,458 in late August, which leaves roughly 7,000 confirmed cases with no food named. The two figures carry different as-of dates, so treat that gap as approximate.

The capacity problems are on the record. Dan Jernigan, who oversaw the CDC laboratory that supports the Cyclospora response until he resigned in 2025, told NPR that at least a third of the lab’s staff is missing and that his former colleagues now help states only on outbreaks that cross state lines. He also said CDC dropped Cyclospora and five other pathogens from active FoodNet tracking last year. In the same piece, Bob Custard of the West Virginia Association of Sanitarians described local food safety programs as grossly understaffed. In Lee County, Florida, a nurse practitioner at a clinic serving mainly uninsured patients told Gulf Coast News Now that the clinic was not testing anyone because patients cannot afford it. The cases it saw in its own staff and patients are in nobody’s count. The national number is a floor.

The numbers that still need answers

None of what follows undercuts the argument. It is the kind of checking that keeps a good argument from being dismissed over one figure.

1. Which food inspectors fell from 1,035 to 473? The brief says the number of federal food inspectors dropped by more than half between September 2024 and February 2026, to the lowest level since at least 2005. The figure has already been repeated in an opinion piece by the Partnership’s president, Max Stier. The Partnership’s methodology page says occupation counts cover a single four-digit OPM job code. FSIS, however, says it has more than 2,000 Food Inspectors, the official title in OPM’s 1863 series, and more than 6,500 inspectors overall. FDA had 443 food safety inspectors in 2024, according to House Oversight Committee Democrats. The 1,035 matches neither. Which code was counted, for which agencies, and does the drop reflect people leaving or positions moving into another series? FSIS lists promotion from Food Inspector to Consumer Safety Inspector, a different series, as a normal career path. USDA has also said that no plant may operate without its required inspection staff, which is the reply anyone claiming the in-plant force was cut in half will get.

2. How many people left the CDC lab that identifies parasitic outbreaks? The brief, citing CNN, says 9 of 11 staff members in 2025. Jernigan told NPR at least a third. HHS told NPR that the CDC laboratory supporting the Cyclospora response was not affected by reductions in force. All three can be true at once, because departures driven by lost USAID funding, buyouts or resignations are not layoffs. The question for HHS is simple: how many people worked in that lab in January 2025, and how many work there now?

3. Which FDA and CDC percentages are right? The brief gives 21.6 percent for FDA and 26.7 percent for CDC, measured from September 2024 to February 2026. Stier’s opinion piece gives 22.2 percent and 28.1 percent, measured from the beginning of the administration. The difference is probably the starting date or the data pull, but readers should be told which figure to use and why.

4. What counts as food and agriculture? The companion page says the workforce in its food and agriculture agencies fell by 11,529 people, or 22 percent, from September 2024 to December 2025. That group includes the Food and Nutrition Service, the Farm Service Agency and the Foreign Agricultural Service, none of which inspect food, and the methodology page adds the Natural Resources Conservation Service. It is a staffing figure for a set of USDA agencies plus FDA, not a food safety staffing figure. The same page reports that FDA’s research and development contract obligations rose 72.3 percent in fiscal 2025, which belongs in the conversation too.

5. Did communications cuts cause the confusing FDA messages? The brief says conflicting FDA statements about the outbreak source followed cuts to the agency’s communications office. The timing is documented; the cause is not. A fair question for FDA is who was writing and clearing outbreak advisories this summer compared with 2024.

What the system got right

Fairness matters here. FDA traceback reached a single lettuce supplier by mid-July, and on August 20 CDC reported that genotyping showed the parasites from sick people were genetically related, evidence that they got sick from the same source. The investigation worked well enough to name a supplier. It did not work well enough to count the sick promptly, to reach people who cannot pay for a test, or to explain roughly 7,000 confirmed cases. That is still a capacity story, and a harder one to argue with. It is also not new. GAO has carried HHS leadership and coordination of public health emergencies on its High-Risk List since 2022, and the cuts made an existing problem worse.

Questions readers are asking

Did federal cuts cause the 2026 Cyclospora outbreak? Nobody has shown that. Contamination happens on farms and in packing operations. The argument is that the cuts slowed counting, testing and response once people got sick.

How many federal food inspectors are there? It depends on who is counted. FSIS says it has more than 6,500 inspectors, and FDA had 443 food safety inspectors in 2024. The Partnership’s figure of 473 covers a single job series, and the Partnership should say which one.

Where is the full Partnership report? The September 9 brief is the full document. Its data come from the interactive site and companion page linked above.

The Partnership is on the right side of this. A good public health argument needs numbers that hold up in a hearing room and, in my line of work, in a deposition. I would like to see answers to the five questions above, and I will post them if I get them.

Botulism T-Shirts, and Four Unanswered Letters, Go to Capitol Hill Wednesday and Thursday

By Bill Marler on September 15, 2026

Posted in Case News

On Wednesday, September 16, and Thursday, September 17, we will be walking the Senate and House office buildings with two things for every member and staff of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The first is the t-shirt, rolled inside a small plastic baby bottle, that reads “For Babies’ Sake, Test for Botulism in Infant Formula.” The second is the stack of letters I have sent those two committees since June. Nobody has answered them.

Last week I wrote that the shirts were coming. Both chambers came back to Washington on Monday. The plan has not changed: all 23 HELP offices and all 54 Energy and Commerce offices get two shirts each, carried in by hand, and so do the committees themselves — the HELP Committee at 428 Dirksen and the Energy and Commerce majority and minority staff in Rayburn. That is 77 member offices, each getting a person at the counter rather than a package on a mail cart.

The letters are going in by hand this time

I have written each committee twice. Energy and Commerce received a letter on June 23 supporting H.R. 7867, with the statements and photographs of fourteen families attached, and a follow-up on August 28. HELP received a letter on June 29 and a follow-up on August 28. Four letters, two to each committee. Not one reply.

Mail to a congressional committee goes through screening, then a mailroom, then a cart, and it can sit a long time before it reaches the staffer who works the issue. This week the two letters each committee has not answered go in with the shirts, handed to a person rather than dropped in a bin. A letter in an envelope is easy to file. A letter that arrives with a baby bottle is harder to lose.

What the government confirmed after the first letters

The June letters made an argument. The August letters reported a laboratory result. On August 27 the CDC closed the Nara Organics investigation and found that epidemiologic, traceback and laboratory data showed Nara Organics Whole Milk Organic Infant Formula was contaminated with Clostridium botulinum and made infants sick. Whole genome sequencing linked a patient sample from the Nara outbreak to a patient sample, product samples and an ingredient sample collected during the 2025 ByHeart investigation. CDC reported that both brands were made with milk supplied by Organic West Milk and spray dried by Dairy Farmers of America, and that the matching sequences point to a common source of contamination.

One qualification belongs in every account of this, and I put it in both letters. Neither agency has determined a root cause, and FDA says it does not yet have enough evidence to say whether the milk was contaminated before drying or during it. That question divides responsibility among the companies. It does not change whether the formula was contaminated, or whether it paralyzed babies.

Forty-eight infants in seventeen states in the ByHeart outbreak. Four in the Nara Organics outbreak, in California, Pennsylvania and Washington. Fifty-two babies hospitalized, many on ventilators, each treated with BabyBIG antitoxin that the State of California prices at $69,300 a dose.

What has not changed

Federal regulation, 21 C.F.R. § 106.55, still requires powdered infant formula makers to test finished product for two organisms, Salmonella and Cronobacter. C. botulinum is not on the list. FDA named the organism by genus and species in a March 8, 2023 Call-to-Action letter to the powdered infant formula industry. The rule never followed, and as I wrote yesterday, it still does not require the test.

H.R. 7867, the Infant Formula Safety Modernization Act of 2026, would put C. botulinum on the required testing list, require environmental monitoring inside the plants, hold foreign manufacturers to American standards and require notice to Congress of confirmed positives. Representatives Rosa DeLauro and Jeff Van Drew introduced it on March 9. The Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee held a hearing on it on April 29. No markup has been scheduled. The Senate passed S. 272 by unanimous consent the same day, which shows this is not a hard vote, but S. 272 reaches only the organisms already on the list.

What we are asking both committees to do

The shirts carry the same requests the August letters did. To Energy and Commerce: mark up H.R. 7867 and report it favorably. To HELP: pass a bill that reaches botulism, whether a companion to H.R. 7867 or one of the Committee’s own. To both: hold an oversight hearing with FDA, Dairy Farmers of America, Organic West Milk, Nara Organics and ByHeart at the table; put the parents at the witness table, because they have already written to you and are willing to say it in person; and send FDA a written question with a deadline asking what its root cause investigation has found, whether it intends to require testing for C. botulinum by regulation, and when.

Quick answers

What is being delivered to Congress on September 16 and 17, 2026? T-shirts packed in baby bottles reading “For Babies’ Sake, Test for Botulism in Infant Formula,” along with hand-delivered copies of four letters Bill Marler sent the Senate HELP Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee in June and August 2026, which have gone unanswered. Every member office on both committees receives them, and so do the committee staff offices.

Why is powdered infant formula not tested for botulism? The federal rule at 21 C.F.R. § 106.55 requires finished-product testing only for Salmonella and Cronobacter. Clostridium botulinum is not on the list, even after two outbreaks that hospitalized 52 infants and that whole genome sequencing has linked to a common source.

What would H.R. 7867 change? It would add C. botulinum to the required testing list, require environmental monitoring in formula plants, apply the same standards to foreign manufacturers and require notice to Congress of confirmed positive tests. It has had a subcommittee hearing and is waiting on a markup in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Four letters, no reply

My direct line is printed on every one of those letters. By Thursday afternoon every office that can put this bill on a calendar will have it twice, once on paper and once rolled up in a baby bottle. We will see which one gets a call back.

The four letters

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/08/HR_7867_Support_Letter_6_23_26_WDM_FINAL.pdf

Letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, June 23, 2026, with Appendix A — statements and photographs of fourteen families.

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/08/Marler_Senate_HELP_Letter_Letterhead.pdf

Letter to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, June 29, 2026.

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/08/HR7867_Follow_Up_Letter_8-28-26.pdf

Follow-up letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, August 28, 2026.

https://www.marlerblog.com/files/2026/08/Senate_HELP_Follow-Up_Letter_8_28_26_WDM.pdf

Follow-up letter to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, August 28, 2026.

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Botulism T-Shirts, and Four Unanswered Letters, Go to Capitol Hill Wednesday and Thursday

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