Sarah Despres and Susan Mayne got to this before I did, on LinkedIn, and they answered it better than I would have. Credit where it belongs. Both have been steady, sourced, unglamorous voices through this outbreak while a great many louder people have not.

Here is what they were answering. Calley Means — senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, one of the administration’s leading voices on food, the man generally credited with brokering the Trump–Kennedy partnership — posted on X that whenever you read about the Cyclospora outbreak, you should know that junk food companies are paying millions of dollars to spur “this hysteria” to get you to eat less real food. There are Cyclosporaoutbreaks every year, he wrote. This is the first year there is a media frenzy. The post quotes an earlier one of his own saying those companies are funding a fake “food borne illness advocacy” group to feed quotes to reporters attacking the real food agenda. Attached to it is a sheet of corporate logos belonging to the Alliance to Stop Foodborne Illness. Eighty-five thousand views and climbing.

Despres put the shape of it plainly: a senior White House official asserting that concern over the largest Cyclosporaoutbreak ever recorded in this country — one that has killed two Americans — is hysteria manufactured by the very food companies the outbreak is financially wrecking. A weird conspiracy theory, she called it, and one that suggests a cavalier attitude toward legitimate food safety problems. She also notes that in an earlier post he described this outbreak as a couple of cases of diarrhea.

Mayne answered the specific slander, and she is the right person to do it. She ran FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition from 2015 to 2023. Stop Foodborne Illness, she wrote, is a thoroughly legitimate nonprofit public health organization devoted to preventing illness and death from contaminated food. She has known the group for years, long before anyone had heard of this outbreak. And she described what is on the walls of their offices: photographs of the faces of children who died of foodborne illness, hung there as a standing reminder of why the work matters, because it could have been anyone’s child. STOP works with consumer advocates and with industry, she wrote, because food safety has to be a shared responsibility.

Noble organization, noble mission.

That was her closing line, and I would not improve on it. Despres added that she has worked with STOP’s chief executive, Sandra Eskin — until recently the Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety at the United States Department of Agriculture — and that Eskin has the record to back the commitment. I have watched this organization for three decades. Nobody bought it. It was built by people who arrived the hard way, carrying photographs.

Now take the accusation seriously enough to check it, because it collapses on the evidence Means chose himself.

The Alliance is not the same thing as Stop Foodborne Illness, and he has run the two together. It is a program housed inside STOP, launched in 2018 with ten companies and now at twenty-five industry partners, organized around food safety culture. Member companies pay in. That is a fair thing to disclose and a fair thing to argue about — I have spent years being skeptical of industry-funded food safety work and I will keep being skeptical of it. But disclosure is not fabrication. Saying a group takes corporate money is a criticism. Saying it does not really exist is a fantasy.

And look at whose logos are actually on the sheet he posted as proof. In December of last year, the Alliance added five members: Amazon, Amerisan, the Meat Institute, Mérieux NutriSciences, and Yum! Brands. Yum! Brands is Taco Bell. Its logo sits in the middle of the image he tweeted. So, the theory is that the corporate parent of the restaurant chain at the dead center of this outbreak — the chain whose sales have taken the hit, whose franchisees are named defendants in lawsuits my firm has filed — is quietly financing the panic about itself. The National Restaurant Association is on that sheet too, which is to say the trade association whose entire job is defending restaurants from exactly this kind of story. Walmart is on it, and Walmart sold the recalled Marketside lettuce. These are not the beneficiaries of lettuce fear. These are its casualties. That is Despres’s point about the illogic, and it is fatal to the whole theory.

The line about every year is true and useless. There are Cyclospora cases every summer; I have been writing about them since the 1990s. The reason there is a frenzy this year is that the numbers are not last year’s numbers. CDC now counts 6,358 illnesses across fifteen states in the lettuce outbreak alone, with at least 278 hospitalizations and two deaths in Michigan, while the states themselves report more than twenty thousand confirmed and suspected cases nationally. It is the largest Cyclospora outbreak this country has ever recorded, by a wide margin. Using an accurate background fact to launder away a foreground one is an old trick. Yes, there are outbreaks every year. There has never been one like this. It is not a couple of cases of diarrhea.

There is a real concern buried under the conspiracy framing, and Mayne got there first and got there better. In an essay in STAT she wrote that consumers should not be faced with a trade-off between nutrition and food safety. That is the legitimate version of the point. People do flee produce after a leafy green outbreak. They go to the pizza and the Doritos and tell themselves an Oreo never gave anybody explosive diarrhea, and they end up differently sick on a longer timeline from something that will never make the news. Nobody wins that trade, and I have watched it happen after every one of these for thirty years. But Mayne names the cause, and the cause is not a cabal. She has been documenting it week after week — career staff shown the door, the advisory committee disbanded, the joint work with Mexican counterparts ended, FoodNet cut from eight pathogens to two with Cyclospora among the six dropped, the traceability rule pushed to 2028. Asked on CBS Sunday Morning whether an outbreak next year could be traced, she said it could not. Her verdict was that this is a national wake-up call.

Despres has been asking the accountability half of the question, and she has the background for it — fifteen years of congressional oversight work, then Pew, then four years as Counselor for Public Health and Science in the Secretary’s office at HHS. Back on July 18 she asked publicly whether the Secretary was pushing Taylor Farms to be more transparent, given that the company was not making its customer list public. Three weeks later that is still the live question, and it has only sharpened as CNN documented the company’s long history of deflecting after outbreaks. Note what the two women have in common. Neither is asking the public to distrust vegetables. Both are asking the government to do the work that would let people trust them.

One last thing, and it is the part that bothers me most. Asked about this outbreak by a reporter this same week, Means said, “I don’t have a comment on cyclospora,” and that he did not want to get into it. No comment for the reporter. Eighty-five thousand views for the conspiracy theory. Two people are dead in Michigan and hundreds have been hospitalized, and the response from a senior official in the department that runs both CDC and FDA is that their families are props in a marketing campaign paid for by Costco and Hershey.

Understand where this criticism is coming from, because it is not coming from outside the tent. I have spent years arguing that the American diet is making people sick, that ultra-processed food is a public health problem, and that whole food is better food. Marion Nestle, who has taken more incoming from this administration than almost anyone, has said flatly that she is not MAHA’s enemy and supports parts of its agenda. Mayne’s whole argument is that nutrition and food safety rise and fall together. The people pushing back hardest on Means this week are not the opponents of eating real food. They are the ones who would have to make it actually work — and who know that it cannot work while the surveillance system that keeps real food from killing people is being taken apart.

That is why this matters beyond one bad tweet. The administration needs serious people advising it on food. There is real work available here — restore Cyclospora to FoodNet, stop delaying traceability, publish one national number the public can rely on — and none of it is partisan. An adviser who spent this week on that instead of on a conspiracy theory about Costco and Hershey would have my support and my thanks. Calling the parents of dead children a front group is not serious work. It is not even in the neighborhood of serious work.

Despres ended her post by saying it appears the White House is not taking this outbreak seriously, but that she is glad FDA’s career staff and outside groups are. That is about where I land too. I am not asking Means to agree with me about FoodNet, or traceability, or who should pay for what. I am asking him to look at the logo sheet he posted. Taco Bell’s parent company is on it. And somewhere on a wall in Chicago there are photographs of children, hung by the people he just called fake.

I was awake at three o’clock this morning doing arithmetic I did not want to do.  I have been thinking about this for weeks and considering the numbers.

Three outbreaks have shaped thirty-three years of my life. In the winter of 1993, undercooked hamburger from Jack in the Box carried E. coli O157:H7 into 732 people across four states. One hundred seventy-one of them were hospitalized. One hundred seventy-eight were left with permanent injury, most of it kidney and brain damage. Four children died, the youngest seventeen months old. In 2008 and 2009, peanut paste from a plant in Blakely, Georgia carried Salmonella Typhimurium out of Peanut Corporation of America and into 714 people in forty-six states. More than half of them were children and a fifth were under the age of five. Nine died. In 2011, cantaloupe from Jensen Farms carried Listeria monocytogenes into 147 people in twenty-eight states. One hundred forty-three of those 147 were hospitalized, ninety-nine percent of everyone who got sick. Thirty-three died and one pregnant woman lost her baby. The median age was seventy-eight. I represented the families of all thirty-three of the dead.

Put those three outbreaks end to end and they sickened 1,593 Americans and filled forty-six graves. The Cyclospora outbreak running right now has sickened at least 26,755 people. That is nearly seventeen times the three defining outbreaks of my career combined, and it has killed two.

There is a way to say that sentence that insults twenty-six thousand people, and I do not mean it that way. Let me deal with that first, because it matters more to me than the arithmetic does.

Nobody who has had cyclosporiasis has ever described it to me as mild. It starts about a week after exposure, sometimes as early as two days and sometimes as late as two weeks. Then comes watery, explosive diarrhea six to ten times a day, cramping, bloating, gas, nausea, a complete loss of appetite, and a fatigue that outlasts all of it. People lose ten, fifteen, twenty pounds. The worst part is that it comes back. It remits and relapses for days and sometimes for more than a month. People go back to work feeling human and are flattened again the following week. The only reliable treatment is trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, so a sulfa allergy leaves a patient with very little. There is no protective immunity afterward, which means a person can get it again. Three decades of listening to people describe foodborne illness, and this one is genuinely awful.

Two people in Michigan have died. Both, according to the state health department, had significant underlying conditions that may have been affected by cyclosporiasis and dehydration, and both became ill before the July 17 recall. I am not going to say more about them than that. Two families are living with this, and the fact that a statistician would call the case fatality rate low is of no use to either of them.

What kept me awake was not the two. It was what the number would have been if the organism riding on that lettuce had been one of the other three. CDC publishes the tool for answering that. Its burden model records, for each pathogen, the share of laboratory-confirmed patients who are hospitalized and the share who die. Checked against this outbreak first, the Cyclospora rate predicts about 1,739 hospitalizations out of 26,755 reported cases, and the thirteen states that publish a figure have reported 680 on a count that is still climbing. Here is what the same 26,755 people would have produced under each of the four organisms.

The model says the Cyclospora row should show zero deaths. It shows two. On the one organism where CDC’s model can be checked against reality this summer, it understates.

I do not have to take the model on faith for the other three, because I watched all of them. Jack in the Box hospitalized 171 of 732 and killed four. Run those observed rates against 26,755 and you get roughly 6,250 people in hospital beds and 146 dead. CDC’s model, built from entirely different data thirty years later, says 134. My own cases and the federal model land in the same place. That convergence is the part I could not put down.

The Listeria row in that table is not a real number and saying why is the most important thing in this piece. Twenty-six thousand seven hundred fifty-five invasive listeriosis cases would be roughly twenty-one years of the entire American burden of that disease compressed into one summer. It cannot happen, because Listeriakills people long before a count climbs that high. The largest listeriosis outbreak in American history was 147 people, and it killed thirty-three of them. The deadliest was 142 people in Los Angeles in 1985, and it killed forty-eight, twenty of them unborn. Neither one reached a hundred and fifty. Hold that against 26,755 and two.

That contrast is not a curiosity. It is the whole argument, and it is sitting in the last column of the table.

The last column is the underdiagnosis multiplier, CDC’s estimate of how many people actually get sick for everyone who is diagnosed and counted. Listeria is 2.1 in the older model and 1.7 in the 2025 rebuild. Cyclospora is 83.1. Listeria is 1.7 because it nearly always puts a person in a hospital where somebody draws a blood culture. Cyclospora is 83.1 because it sends a person home for a month. The multiplier is a severity index wearing a disguise, and this summer’s enormous count is enormous precisely because the organism is survivable. A lethal one would have produced a far smaller number that was far more complete. The size of the count and the mildness of the disease are the same fact.

The table also does not show what happens to the survivors. Five to ten percent of E. coli O157:H7 patients develop hemolytic uremic syndrome, which at 26,755 cases is between 1,338 and 2,676 people, most of them children. About half of them need dialysis, three to five percent die, and ten to thirty percent of the survivorscarry long-term kidney damage.

Now hold the exposure constant instead of the case count, which is the honest way to run this. Same field in central Mexico, same untested irrigation water, same processing plant at Doctor Mora, same 1.1 million bags of lettuce into a national grocery chain, same twenty-seven-state distribution footprint in FDA’s own recall record, same recall with its window set by shelf life rather than by contamination, reaching back only to product made in the last days of June against a median illness onset of June 22. Nothing in that chain is Cyclospora-specific. The water was not tested for anything. There is no kill step on a bag of lettuce for any organism and washing defeats none of them. The traceability rule that would have shortened the traceback is delayed to July 2028 for all of them, by Congressional direction. The agricultural water rule names generic E. coli as its only numeric criterion. Every one of those failures sits in exactly the same place if what was living in that canal had been O157 instead. And O157 does not send people home for a month. It sends children to dialysis, and in some instances, early deaths.

I do not have to imagine that one either. In 2006, E. coli O157:H7 came out of river water on a California ranch where a grass-fed cattle operation sat less than a mile from the spinach field, and it went into bags of fresh spinach shipped across the country. Two hundred twenty-five people were counted in twenty-seven states. One hundred sixteen of them were hospitalized. Thirty-nine developed hemolytic uremic syndrome. Five died. I litigated that one too. That is the same commodity, the same absence of a kill step, and the same water nobody was testing, twenty years earlier and with a different organism in it.

Here is the bleakest thing I know about my own profession. Every reform I have watched this country make came after a body count. Four dead children in 1993 got us pathogen reduction, hazard analysis, and E. coliO157:H7 declared an adulterant in ground beef. Five dead from spinach and nine dead from peanut butter got us the Food Safety Modernization Act and, eventually, a company president sentenced to twenty-eight years. Thirty-three dead from cantaloupe, seven months after that law was signed, put two growers in federal criminal court. Nobody legislated because 732 people had bloody diarrhea or because 147 people were hospitalized. They legislated because of the graves.

That means the arithmetic cuts the wrong way this time. This outbreak has produced more sick Americans than the three defining outbreaks of my career put together, and it has produced two deaths, and two deaths is not enough to move anybody.

I should say plainly what this exercise is and is not. Pathogens cannot simply be swapped at a constant case count, because attack rates and who gets sick differ by organism, and this summer’s 26,755 exists partly because Cyclospora leaves a large population alive to be counted. The rates I applied are observed among laboratory-confirmed patients while the 26,755 includes probable cases, so the run is generous. None of that changes the direction, and the direction is the only thing I am claiming.

We did not manage this outbreak. We drew the mild card. Twenty-six thousand seven hundred fifty-five people, at least 680 hospital beds and two graves is what the failure of an entire food safety system looks like when the organism happens to be the gentlest one in the deck. The national case count is still climbing. The next contaminated field will be planted in a few months, and nobody gets to choose what bug is living in the water when it is.

Luck is not a food safety program.

Saturday, August 8, 2026

Last Saturday this column was called The Week Cyclospora Stopped Being a Health Story and Became an Accounting One. This week the accounting stopped being the argument. On Monday it was announced that two people died in Michigan. On Tuesday a newspaper announced a federal expansion the government had not. On Wednesday the government’s own count went from 1,947 people in nine states to 6,358 in fifteen, and not one of those additional 4,411 Americans got sick that day. What changed was a definition. 

Two people died, and the state said no additional information would be provided. Michigan announced on Monday that both individuals had significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration, that both fell ill before the July 17 recall, and that nothing further would be released. These are the first deaths anywhere in this outbreak. May have been impacted by is contributory language, not a finding on cause of death, and I will not stretch it into one. But I wrote on Monday and will say it again: who the hell cares that they had significant underlying health conditions. Most people who die in a foodborne outbreak do. It kills the very young, the very old and the immune compromised — that is who it has always killed, and the phrase does not make either loss smaller. I have represented families of people who died after eating a salad, and their losses were every bit as significant as anyone else’s. Nor has anyone described how a Cyclospora death gets counted in the first place.

The Washington Post announced the expansion two days before the government did. Lena H. Sun and Rachel Roubein reported Tuesday afternoon that CDC was expanding this outbreak from nine states to fifteen, attributed to three individuals familiar with the investigation, and by 4:13 p.m. Eastern they had named all six additions — Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire and North Carolina. Every federal page still said nine that afternoon. Sun and Roubein have been right every time; this is about what has happened to the announcement channel for a federal outbreak investigation, and it was the second time in twelve days.

Then the federal count tripled, and nobody new got sick. On Wednesday CDC and FDA both posted it: 6,358 illnesses, fifteen states, 278 hospitalizations, two deaths. The day before, the same outbreak was 1,947 people in nine states. The case definition widened — until Wednesday a person entered by reporting they ate at Taco Bell, and now they can enter by eating at Taco Bell or by eating recalled Taylor Farms lettuce anywhere at all. The change was not announced, not dated, and the earlier series was not republished, so no trend line through it means anything. It is the point I have been making since mid-July. The federal number was never measuring a parasite. It was measuring one restaurant chain.

Taylor Farms says the lettuce shipped June 29. FDA says people started getting sick June 22.The company told the Post the recalled shredded iceberg went out June 29 through July 16, and when the paper asked what had shipped before June 29, it declined to say. CDC puts incubation at two to fourteen days, so a June 22 onset means an exposure at least nine days before the recall window even opens. New Hampshire published its own exposure window, the beginning of June through July 20 — four weeks wider than the company’s at the front, with a street address on it. A recall is a boundary drawn on a calendar. Taylor Farms drew this one and will not say what is on the other side of the line.

And Taylor Farms’ own page now says two different things about where the lettuce went. The company put up a Cyclospora information hub this week: central Mexico sourcing suspended for the season, production there halted since July 18, outside experts commissioned, roughly two thousand of its own samples negative since May, and a concession it spent July arguing around — that epidemiological evidence is a legitimate tool in an outbreak investigation. Read it twice, though. Its recall notice lists twenty-seven states without West Virginia; its own FAQ answers the same question with twenty-eight, West Virginia included. FDA’s advisory has the identical split between two of its sections. West Virginia has been an outbreak state since July 14, Nebraska is on neither list, and nobody has explained how a state joins an outbreak traced to a product the shipping records say never arrived. One line there is worth the whole page: the company says its water sources are tested for indicator organisms. That is generic E. coli — the only numeric criterion in the federal agricultural water rule, and the organism FDA’s own guidance says will not find this parasite. They are doing what the rule asks. The rule asks for the wrong test. CNN spent the week on the pattern behind all of it. Casey Tolan, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Curt Devine and Kyung Lah counted at least five Cyclospora and E. colioutbreaks tied to the company over the past decade, and Lah put it on television Friday. A former senior FDA official says the company worked hard to keep the agency from naming it in the 2024 McDonald’s onion outbreak. FDA has not inspected the Guanajuato plant since 2019, and this year five of the company’s more than 160,000 Mexican shipments were physically inspected. People eat the evidence. A negative result on what is left in the cooler is not a finding of innocence, and it is no substitute for a name.

Michigan alone now reports more people hospitalized than the entire fifteen-state outbreak.The state finished the week at 12,485 cases with 279 hospitalizations. The federal figure for all fifteen states is 278. The same afternoon it reported that 279, Michigan lifted its bagged-salad advisory. Natasha Bagdasarian, the state’s chief medical executive, said the worst is behind us on the data available today, and was careful to say she meant Michigan. The state is also going from daily to weekly reporting, so the number that has driven this count all summer will now arrive once a week.

Ohio has now reported sixty-four times what it reported in all of last year. The state dashboard passed 4,900 cases, with 3,399 confirmed between July 4 and August 4 alone. Ohio confirmed 76 in all of 2025. Arkansas is at 237 against seven last year, 144 of them in Benton County, against the 41 Arkansans CDC counts in the fifteen-state outbreak. Add every state’s own published number and the floor is 26,755 people, up 5,303 in a week. CDC’s surveillance page reads 10,468 laboratory-confirmed plus 12,255 awaiting confirmation, unmoved since Tuesday. Hold any of those against the 249 cases reported nationally by this point last year.

FDA opened a brand-new Cyclospora investigation the same day it announced the old one had reached 6,358. The agency’s outbreak table now carries seven Cyclospora files and one of them names a food. Reference 1398 was posted August 5 — ten people, no vehicle. Reference 1385 went from 10 to 25, which FDA explains by saying it now includes illnesses with similarities in reported exposures — the agency telling you it has found a common exposure pattern in a file whose food it will not name. Six open files, 178 people, no product.

And I put the argument where people could check it. Thursday night Food Safety News ran fifteen things FDA and CDC could do about this parasite, four of which require no rulemaking, no appropriation and no act of Congress. Friday I wrote about recall readiness, which nobody measures until the week they need it. And earlier a box of t-shirts arrived, every one reading Test Infant Formula for Botulism — a different outbreak, four hospitalized babies, the same problem underneath it.

On the blog it was a week of old arguments picking up new proof. Thursday I said what I think of the Secretary’s July 21 assurance that this was under control, and set 2011 beside 2026 — sixty-eight people sick in ten states and CDC called it Restaurant Chain A, against FDA naming Taco Bell in the first sentence of its first advisory this July. Nothing changed in between but the decision to type the name. Friday I gave six reasons the produce trade association is wrong to tell CDC that endemic American water is behind this, the first being that the parasite does not multiply outside a person, so every oocyst in an American lake came out of an American. Marion Nestle told her readers what to do about all of it. And I sat down with KBJR in Duluth on the question I get asked most: when does food poisoning become a lawsuit. It becomes one when nobody will tell a sick family what happened to them.

The jalapeño outbreak got a country, a state and a distributor, but not a grower. CDC posted its Salmonella Javiana outbreak page Wednesday: 345 sick in 27 states, 36 hospitalized, with 177 of 191 interviewed reporting a Mexican-style restaurant and both Chipotle and QDOBA named. The peppers came from Sinaloa by way of Coast Citrus Distributors. The grower was identified by traceback and not named, and the recall carries no lot codes and no consignee list while CDC tells businesses to check whether their peppers are recalled. Javiana is a water organism. Two of the isolates carry antibiotic resistance, one of them multidrug-resistant and nonsusceptible to ciprofloxacin. And look at the sequence. Chipotle switched jalapeño suppliers on July 20 and QDOBA stopped serving them on July 28. FDA opened its traceback on July 22 and named Sinaloa and Coast Citrus on August 5. Two restaurant chains and a Minnesota epidemiologist got there first, and while they did, FDA’s own outbreak table still carried this file at 212 illnesses with no food identified. Three numbers for one outbreak, from one government, in one week. That is the sentence I have been writing about Cyclospora all summer, in a different aisle of the same store.

The recognized record of fresh-pepper Salmonella outbreaks in this country is exactly three, and all three came out of the same place. I put the whole history down this week. In 2008 SalmonellaSaintpaul sickened 1,442 people across 43 states, hospitalized at least 286, and investigators spent the summer wrecking the domestic tomato market before the strain finally turned up on a Mexican-grown jalapeño in a McAllen warehouse and in irrigation water on a farm in Mexico. In 2016 Salmonella Anatum sickened 32 people in nine states, and that one was solved only because FDA’s own laboratory happened to have sequenced an Anaheim pepper months before the outbreak existed. Now 2026. Three outbreaks in eighteen years is not a measure of how often peppers make people sick. It is a measure of how often anybody manages to prove it. After 2008 the Associated Press went through the border records and found chilies were the most-rejected Mexican crop of the preceding year, with Salmonella in eight percent of intercepted shipments. Nobody acted on it. Fresh chilies are grown outdoors in warm climates, irrigated with surface water, harvested by hand and eaten raw, and there is no wash that reliably clears the crevice where the stem meets the fruit. It is the same argument as the lettuce, and it has the same answer at the bottom of it, which is the water.

And the rest of the ledger, because it did not stop for the parasite. FDA’s outbreak table still carries the Midwest Poultry Services shell egg Salmonella Enteritidis outbreak at 98 illnesses and 26 hospitalizations across seventeen states, off a recall of more than nineteen million eggs. A Salmonella Oranienburg cluster sits at 93 with no food named at all. Still open too: the Listeria outbreak in Clover Hill requesón and soft ricotta, twelve sick, ten hospitalized, one dead; the E. coli O145:H28 investigation into GreenWise frozen blueberries sold at Publix; and the infant botulism outbreak behind the Nara Organics formula recall, four babies, all four hospitalized. On Friday USDA pulled 29,628 pounds of Argentine beef and 5,084 pounds of swai from the United Arab Emirates, both of which entered this country without import reinspection. Phyllis Entis has the international roundup at eFoodAlert, as she does every day.

That’s the week — two people dead, a federal count that tripled on a definition instead of an exposure, one state reporting more hospitalizations than the whole outbreak it belongs to, a company that will not say what shipped before the twenty-ninth of June, and a parasite that has made more Americans sick in one summer than the government’s own records show for the previous thirty-four years. And in the same seven days, jalapeños out of Sinaloa put thirty-six people in the hospital across twenty-seven states while the grower stayed anonymous. The season CDC defines runs through August 31. That is twenty-three days. 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.