This week the investigation moved into court. My firm filed the first lawsuit of the outbreak in federal court in Ohio — Ayyad v. Pacific Bells, LLC — on behalf of a North Olmsted man who ate at his local Taco Bell twice in mid-June, fell ill days later, and tested positive for Cyclospora. The suit names the company that operates that restaurant, along with the still-unnamed growers and suppliers behind the produce, and it won’t be the last.

The likely source of the summer’s Cyclospora outbreak now has a supplier and a restaurant attached to it. Investigators have traced the suspected vehicle to shredded iceberg lettuce grown by Taylor Farms and served at Taco Bell, the Washington Post reported on July 16, citing two people familiar with the investigation. The thread runs through all four of the hardest-hit states: a high share of the sick had eaten at Taco Bell, lettuce was the menu item they had in common, and when the FDA asked the chain where that lettuce came from, the answer — in Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky alike — was Taylor Farms. No agency has confirmed it on the record, the source is still called “potential,” and neither company had responded as of publication. But neither name is new to this kind of story.

Taco Bell has been the name in a lettuce outbreak before — more than once. In 2006, the CDC publicly named the chain in an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak across the Northeast that sickened 71 people, hospitalized 53 and left eight with hemolytic uremic syndrome, a form of kidney failure; investigators first blamed green onions, then settled on shredded lettuce. In 2010 and again in 2011, multistate Salmonella outbreaks were traced to the chain the CDC would only call “Restaurant Chain A” — later confirmed to be Taco Bell — in which roughly nine in ten of the sick had eaten lettuce. Further back sit a 1999 E. coli outbreak tied to its beef tacos and a 1995 hepatitis A outbreak traced to an infected worker. The produce that keeps surfacing in Taco Bell’s outbreaks is lettuce.

Taylor Farms’s record is heavier still. In 2013, the FDA traced a multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak — the illness clusters at Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants in Iowa and Nebraska — to salad mix from Taylor Farms de Mexico. In 2015 the company recalled a celery-and-onion mix tied to an E. coli outbreak in Costco chicken salads that sickened nineteen. And in 2024, Taylor Farms slivered onions were the likely source of the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders — more than a hundred people sick across fourteen states, dozens hospitalized, one dead — after which FDA inspectors documented poor handwashing and dirty equipment at the company’s Colorado processing plant. A Cyclospora outbreak traced to Taylor Farms lettuce would not be the first time the parasite, or a supplier by that name, sat at the center of one.

All of this is unfolding while the official count sleepwalks. Every new case added to the national tally this week came from the same handful of states that still bother to update; Michigan alone drove the running total past 7,500. The rest have gone quiet — Ohio’s dashboard hasn’t moved in a week, sixteen states appear only as a range of “one to ten,” and the CDC’s own confirmed count froze at 1,645 three days ago. The outbreak isn’t slowing down. The counting is.

Look at how lopsided it has become. Michigan’s 4,312 cases — more than half the country’s total — dwarf the CDC’s entire four-state “outbreak,” which the agency still pegs at just over 400. In a normal year the state sees forty or fifty. Set one state’s dashboard against the federal cluster and the official number stops looking like the outbreak and starts looking like the slice of it investigators have so far been able to stitch together.

Ask all fifty health departments whether they are part of this and you get three different answers. Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky say yes and are working the case alongside Michigan. Indiana, sitting on 206 cases, calls itself part of a nationwide outbreak. And then a run of states carrying real, elevated counts says, in effect, nothing unusual here: New York, at roughly 470 cases, calls it “not a major deviation from the norm”; Illinois, at 216, says there is “no evidence of a large outbreak”; New Jersey, at 46, is “not experiencing … outbreaks”; Massachusetts, at 18, calls it a “normal seasonal amount”; and Virginia, at 10, says its cases are not a pattern that would “constitute an outbreak”. Two of the largest states never entered the outbreak at all: California is seeing fewer cases than last year, and Washington says flatly that it “is not seeing an outbreak.” Whether a sick person is counted as part of an outbreak depends heavily on which state line they were standing behind when they got sick.

This is what last summer’s paperwork looks like once it reaches the produce aisle. When the CDC quietly made Cyclospora reporting optional under its FoodNet program in July 2025, it weakened the very machinery that turns a scatter of state counts into one fast national picture. The parasite is nationally notifiable in only 47 states, it is invisible on a routine stool test unless a physician asks for it by name, and every figure in the chart below is a floor, not a ceiling. When Oklahoma and Kansas finally opened their own books this week, each found roughly five times the cases the CDC had listed for it. The gap widens: a parasite moving through the national salad supply on one side, and on the other an official tally that trails the real one by thousands of cases.

For the person on the third week of watery diarrhea, whether their state is “officially” part of the outbreak is a distinction without a difference. They are sick, the source is still on the shelf, and the system built to find it is being asked to do the job with fewer people and a smaller net.

Here is where all fifty state health departments stood as of July 15, 2026 — the number each reports for 2026, and whether it calls those cases part of the outbreak.