SSaturday, July 25, 2026
Last Saturday this column was called The Source Finally Got a Name — and Then FDA Found It on Lettuce That Was Never Recalled. This week the government caught up — to the Washington Post, to the Wall Street Journal, to state health departments that had already published what the federal pages would not. And when CDC finally moved its outbreak page on Friday, the outbreak got six weeks shorter. Here’s what moved.
The Secretary said it was under control on Tuesday. At a health care fraud briefing on July 21, Secretary Kennedy said the administration has the outbreak “under control,” that epidemiological forensics had identified the source, and that the companies involved had recalled. In the seventy-two hours that followed, Michigan went from 7,171 cases to 8,176 and from 102 hospitalizations to 160, CDC added four states to the outbreak, and FDA opened another Cyclospora investigation with no product named.
The counting gap is now CDC’s own argument. Add up every state that publishes a number and the floor is roughly 14,800. CDC’s surveillance page carries 4,173 lab-confirmed domestic cases, more than 7,400 awaiting analysis and 308 hospitalizations, against 249 cases at this point last year. That page now states that CDC’s updates exclude probable cases, that state figures run higher because states include them, and that a roughly six-week reporting lag means the counts keep climbing. That is not a critic’s characterization of the numbers. It is the agency’s.
The Post named the ninth state before CDC did. Friday morning Lena H. Sun reported that CDC had linked Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to the Taco Bell outbreak, while CDC’s own page still said five states. Kansas and Oklahoma had already said so themselves. Hours later the agencies caught up: 1,947 cases in nine states, 98 hospitalizations, no deaths. Note the arithmetic — adding four states raised the outbreak count by 303 and the hospitalizations by four, while those same four states report about 900 cases of their own. I wrote about that Friday.
And the outbreak got six weeks shorter. The official onset range had been May 13 through July 13. It is now June 22 through July 20, and FDA’s new nine-state page carries both dates on the same screen. On the same day four states came into the outbreak, roughly six weeks of illness went out of it.
Three things arrived with that page. The distribution list grew from 27 states to 28, and the single addition is West Virginia — the outbreak state I kept flagging as missing from the company’s own list. FDA broke retail out from foodservice for the first time: Marketside product went to Walmart stores in fifteen states, and of the nine outbreak states only Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia appear, meaning the two hardest-hit states got this lettuce through foodservice. And a new international distribution heading discloses that recalled product was sold to consumers in Mexico — a day after Mexico’s health ministry announced its own plant sampling came back negative.
Then Friday night, the Journal. Taylor Farms called the White House to ask that the recall announcement be delayed, arguing the government had no positive laboratory test and was overstating the company’s culpability. The call was arranged by Trent Morse, a lobbyist for the company and a former senior White House personnel official. The next part matters as much as the first: the White House went back to FDA separately, asked how the traceback had been done, reviewed how the agency planned to tell the public, was persuaded, and gave FDA the green light. The same story answers a question I had been asking for a week — FDA did not name Taylor Farms on July 16 because of legal restrictions around trade secrets, which is why the advisory referred only to a single unnamed supplier. My firm represents people sickened in this outbreak and has sued Taylor Farms entities.
The President was asked about lettuce for the first time on Friday. Peter Doocy asked when it would be safe to eat lettuce again, and the answer was “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it,” followed by a promise of a major tariff on Mexico over the lettuce. Taylor Farms is a California company headquartered in Salinas; the lettuce was shredded at its own plant at Doctor Mora in Guanajuato. A tariff does not test irrigation water, inspect a field, trace a lot code or count a sick person. It is not a food safety measure.
All of it is being run by acting officials. FDA has no confirmed Commissioner; Kyle Diamantas has been acting since May 12. CDC has no confirmed Director; Jay Bhattacharya has been performing the duties since February while also running NIH, and I have not been able to find a public statement from him about this outbreak. The nominee, Dr. Erica Schwartz, had her Senate hearing on July 15 and still awaits a vote. Klobuchar, Stanton and Ossoff all wrote with questions, two of them with deadlines. I am not aware of a substantive answer to any of the three.
And it may not all be lettuce. Kari Irvin, deputy director of FDA’s Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation Network, said Friday that “We have multiple investigations of cyclospora open,” and that preliminary work on North Carolina’s 561 cases points toward parsley and cilantro rather than lettuce. North Carolina’s own read is multiple vehicles, not one product from one company. One recall did not close this.
Nineteen million eggs, and seven months of sick people. CDC posted 98 Salmonella Enteritidis illnesses in 17 states, 26 hospitalized, with onsets from November 21, 2025 to June 30, 2026. Midwest Poultry Services recalled 1,589,577 dozen shell eggs out of two Texas farms. I wrote that one up Friday — and got back a correction worth more than the post. Dr. Eric Gingerich, a poultry veterinarian in Zionsville, Indiana, wrote to tell me that American producers vaccinate their layers extensively, and that Britain’s Lion Code is an industry scheme rather than a government mandate. He is right on both counts. USDA’s own survey of 328 table-egg farms found 99 percent vaccinating, on close to the protocol he described. I have corrected the post and I am grateful for the letter. What survives the correction is the interval: we vaccinate the hens, swab the house twice in a laying hen’s life, send an inspector every three to five years, and nobody pulled a carton for seven months.
The federal table went from fourteen investigations to sixteen. Ten of the sixteen on FDA’s outbreak table have nothing in the product column, up from eight last week — including a brand-new SalmonellaJaviana investigation at 106 cases, an Oranienburg cluster up from 69 to 81, an Enteritidis cluster up from 91 to 96, and another Cyclospora investigation at 72. Both moringa leaf powder investigations ended. The table has not been updated since Wednesday, so the row for the lettuce outbreak still points at the advisory FDA superseded on Friday. Meanwhile the frozen blueberry E. coli O145:H28 outbreak, the soft cheese Listeriaoutbreak and the infant botulism outbreak — four babies, all hospitalized — all remain open. I represent families in those cases. On the recall side, Maple Leaf Foods pulled about 12,036 pounds of not-ready-to-eat smoked bacon imported from Canada without import reinspection, and Phyllis Entis has the full roundup.
I am headed to New Orleans. IAFP 2026 opens tomorrow at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and runs through Wednesday. It convenes while the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history is still being counted, by nine different methods, in nine different states. If you are there, find me.
The answer to “when will it be safe to eat lettuce again” is not a tariff. It is three things, and all three are sitting there waiting.
- Restore the Microbiological Data Program, which for eleven years pulled high-risk produce off the shelf and tested it, and which the industry lobbied to death in 2012.
- Put the Food Traceability Rule into force. Its compliance date was January 20, 2026 — four months before the first person in this outbreak got sick — and it now sits pushed to July 20, 2028.
- Put Cyclospora back into FoodNet. Reporting had been mandatory since 1997; on July 1, 2025 FoodNet dropped six of its eight pathogens.
That’s the week — four states added to an outbreak that got six weeks shorter, a recall the company tried to slow down, nineteen million eggs seven months late, a federal table with ten investigations and nothing in the product column, and one veterinarian who took the time to tell me I had it wrong. 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.