Today I fly to New Orleans for IAFP 2026, the annual meeting of the International Association for Food Protection, July 26 through 29 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. It is the largest food safety conference in the world — thousands of microbiologists, regulators, quality assurance directors and academics from more than sixty
At five o’clock this morning Eastern time, the Washington Post reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked four more states to the Cyclospora outbreak traced to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania join Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. Nine states.
CDC’s own outbreak
Three federal maps describe the 2026 Cyclospora Summer. Read in order, they move from what has been established, to what is documented but unexamined, to what nobody has yet explained.
CDC, Where People Got Sick: Cyclospora Outbreak, July 2026 — last reviewed July 16, 2026.
This part is settled. FDA’s traceback investigation identified convergence on
In November 2013, after Cyclospora cayetanensis sickened hundreds of people in Iowa and Nebraska, FDA published an environmental assessment of the Taylor Farms de México processing plant at Doctor Mora, Guanajuato. The report closed with recommendations. The second told the firm to determine whether Cyclospora is a reasonably likely hazard in the Guanajuato leafy green
Mexico’s health secretary, David Kershenobich, told reporters Tuesday that his government has found no evidence that the outbreak sickening thousands of Americans began on a lettuce farm in Guanajuato. He said Mexico is taking precautions anyway, and its food-safety agencies, Cofepris and Senasica, say they are running preventive inspections and traceability checks in the state.
Nearly twelve thousand cyclosporiasis cases have now been reported to the CDC this summer — 4,173 confirmed in the laboratory as domestically acquired, and more than 7,400 more still awaiting the analysis that would confirm them, many of them in Michigan and Ohio. Michigan alone counted 6,571 as of July 21, with 102 hospitalizations and
The Secretary of Health and Human Services said today that this outbreak is “under control.” I would like that to be true. Here is what the states reported while he was saying it.
Michigan added 2,408 new cases in the week ending July 18. The three weeks before that were 71, then 498, then
On Sunday I graded every trade association in this outbreak on what it said and on how it handled being overtaken by events. I need to start by grading myself, because a paragraph of mine came apart within hours of publication. I wrote that there was a positive lot and that it was detained, and
Taylor Fresh Foods told the public on Sunday that the FDA apologized to it – seemingly trying to sell the public that it has been exonerated as being the cause of some part of the Cyclospora Outbreak tearing through the East and Midwest.
The company led with that sentence. On Monday morning FDA answered in
Taylor Fresh Foods opened its Sunday statement this way: “Today, FDA apologized to us.” That is the first line. Not the second, not the fourth. The first.
I do not know what anyone said on a phone call, and I am not going to comment on a private conversation I was not part of. But
