State health officials in Michigan said Monday they have identified lettuces and salad greens as a “potential source” of the thousands of cases of cyclosporiasis, a parasite infection that produces “watery diarrhea,” loss of appetite and weight loss.
In a statement, the Michigan department of health and human services said the investigation is ongoing but early results “suggest lettuce or salad greens as a potential source for this outbreak,” and experts warned it is too early to rule out alternative food sources.
“The statement said: “The source has not been linked to any particular type of fruit or any particular grower or supplier.”
The more than 2,800 instances come a year after the Trump administration cut funds to state and local health departments, and cut back the mandate of a program dedicated to coordinating information on foodborne illness, including of cyclospora.
“It’s like putting a puzzle together,” said Barbara Kowalcyk, an assistant professor at the George Washington University’s Milken Institute of Public Health and director of the university’s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security. “(You) take pieces out of your puzzle, it’s harder to see the whole picture, and that’s what we’ve done. “We’ve taken bits and pieces of the full puzzle.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday said there were 843 confirmed cases and 1,500 suspected cases of cyclosporiasis in 31 states. Eighty-six individuals were hospitalised, and there were no deaths. The CDC anticipates the federal case count to go up, in part because of the usual delays that occur in illness investigation.
Michigan seems to be especially severely struck, with health officials reporting 2,640 cases. And across the border in Ohio, state officials are reporting 177 cases.
The Michigan health agency is telling restaurants and commercial kitchens in the south-east to wash leafy greens, snow peas, certain herbs and raspberries thoroughly, or better still, cook them. Officials in Michigan also recommended buying full heads of lettuce rather than pre-washed, bagged greens, stripping off the outer leaves and cleaning the inner leaves thoroughly after identifying lettuces as the likely source.
Cyclospora has a two-week incubation period and the CDC anticipates a six-week reporting lag from onset of disease and receipt of a case report. It’s difficult to trace an illness with a long incubation period. In an effort to identify commonalities between cases—like eating at the same restaurant or shopping at the same store—epidemiologists interview everyone with a lab-confirmed case. Those interviews are usually done two to four weeks after infection, so it is hard for people to remember what they ate.
But Dr Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan’s chief medical administrator, told the Associated Press: “There is clearly a linked outbreak happening right now.”
But, in an era of funding cuts, Kowalcyk said ordinary delays have probably been worsened.
“Are current cyclospora outbreak activities affected by the cuts in funding for public health? “I think they do,” Kowalcyk remarked. “If you’re short-staffed you might be interviewing [patients] after six to eight weeks.”
Kowalcyk said the delays are partly due to the Trump administration’s financial cuts, which include both grant cuts to state and local health departments and changes to federal monitoring systems that make it tougher to gather “the whole picture.”
In March 2025, the Trump administration cancelled $11.4 billion in subsidies to state and local health departments. While such grants were designated for pandemic efforts, Kowalcyk said they also expanded local health department capability. Michigan public health laboratories alone lost $5.5m, local news outlet Bridge Michigan said.
“You could have people in state and local health departments that are funded by three or four different funding sources,” Kowalcyk added. “If you lose one, you have to have people go part-time or you have to cut your staff. “There’s not a lot of choice, so your ability to scale up in an outbreak is limited.”
Also in July 2025, the Trump administration restricted the reach of FoodNet, a program that actively monitored for foodborne outbreaks. FoodNet’s remit was reduced from eight foodborne pathogens, including cyclospora, to just shiga toxin generating E coli and salmonella.
FoodNet facilitated coordination of information between states, and created the oft-cited estimate that 48 million people living in the U.S. get sick with foodborne illnesses every year, 128,000 are hospitalised and 3,000 die.
“The current HHS administration seems to think that if you don’t address a problem, it will go away,” Gail Hansen, a public health and veterinary consultant, told the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in August 2025. States have little capacity to coordinate information and data across states and this cut will take us back into a time before FoodNet.
The government has largely defended the reduction in scope of FoodNet as reducing duplicative activities, and maintained that foodborne disease investigations aren’t impacted by the shift.
In April, the CDC website update stated in part: “FoodNet’s reporting requirements were narrowed because the surveillance landscape has changed since the collaboration began in 1995. “Other surveillance systems are currently tracking infection with FoodNet pathogens.
Asked for comment, HHS senior press secretary Emily Hilliard said: “Under the leadership of Secretary [Robert F] Kennedy [Jr], FDA is currently investigating Cyclospora outbreaks using established epidemiologic, laboratory, and traceback tools in close coordination with CDC and state and local partners. Protecting the nation’s food supply is a primary mission of the FDA and the agency has the knowledge, personnel, and resources it needs to detect, investigate, and respond to foodborne illness outbreaks and take regulatory action as appropriate.
“To be clear, cyclospora tracking never stopped. “CDC is working with 3,000 health departments to gather data.
