A record cyclospora outbreak has sickened thousands through fresh produce. Because only humans carry the parasite, it exposes who really grows America’s food.
Somewhere between the Sweetgreen line and the Erewhon smoothie counter, the salad became a character reference. Ordering greens in their many forms signals discipline, disposable income, and a certain idea of taking care of yourself; the bagged version in the supermarket refrigerator carries the same promise: triple-washed, ready to eat, virtuous by default. Berries deliver the same virtue in their soft green cardboard trays. Just like the court of Louis XIV, where rare and exotic fruits became powerful symbols of status, we make those early morning trips to the farmers market to gaze at and touch the freshly picked modern-day markers of taste, seasonality, and abundance.
The last time that promise cracked in a way people remembered, it happened at the least likely address (or most likely, depending on how you look at it). In the summer of 2018, a cyclospora outbreak traced to Fresh Express salad mix served at McDonald’s sickened 511 people across 16 states, sending 24 of them to the hospital, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Two years later, the same manufacturer’s bagged salads, sold under store labels at Walmart, Aldi, and Hy-Vee, were linked to 701 illnesses in 14 states.
This summer, the parasite is back and appears to be worse than ever. As of July 14, the CDC had confirmed 1,645 domestic cases of cyclosporiasis across 34 states since May 1, with more than 5,100 additional cases under investigation and 141 people hospitalized, the agency reported.
A parasite that only travels through people
Cyclospora cayetanensis keeps company with no animals. It has no cow, no chicken, no reservoir waiting in a pond or a herd. “Humans appear to be the only major host for C. cayetanensis,” the CDC’s diagnostic parasitology reference states. The microbe completes its life cycle in a single, unpleasant loop: it passes in human stool, spends one to two weeks maturing in soil or water, and reaches the next person only through the food or water they swallow, the agency explains. It does not move from one person to another by touch, and it does not move at all without human waste.
That biology turns every cyclospora outbreak into a kind of ledger. Salmonella can arrive from a chicken and E. coli from a cow, but cyclospora records something more specific about us. When it surfaces on a raspberry or in a bag of chopped romaine, it means human feces reached that food somewhere between the field and the clamshell. Because the parasite is transmitted only by humans, its presence functions as a fingerprint.
Who actually grows the salad
The chopped salad that reads as a wellness flex at the register begins as stoop labor in the sun. Roughly 2.9 million people do the hand work of American agriculture, and about 70 percent of them were born outside the United States — 63 percent of them in Mexico, according to the National Center for Farmworker Health. Their average completed schooling is the ninth grade, their average wage in the most recent National Agricultural Workers Survey was $13.59 an hour, and about 20 percent live in families with incomes below the federal poverty line. Around 42 percent hold no work authorization at all, USDA data show.
In other words, the illness travels in the opposite direction of the money.
The people most exposed to the conditions that seed a cyclospora outbreak are the ones paid least to endure them, and the people who fall ill are, disproportionately, the shoppers with the means to buy pre-washed organic greens or $15 trays of berries at a farmers market. A parasite that can only pass through a human gut becomes, in effect, a courier between two Americas that rarely meet: the one that bends over the rows and the one that eats what those rows produce.
The bathroom gap in American fields
Federal law has technically guaranteed farmworkers a toilet since 1987. The OSHA field sanitation standard requires any operation with 11 or more hand-laborers to provide one toilet and one handwashing facility for every 20 workers, within a quarter-mile of the crew, along with cool, potable drinking water, the Department of Labor specifies. Operations with fewer than 11 workers are exempt, inspectors are generally thin on the ground, and workers paid by the piece and anxious about their immigration status seldom file a complaint when the promised toilet is locked, foul, or a five-minute walk across the furrows.
The consequences run straight back into the water. When field workers with poor access to functional restrooms relieve themselves nearby, National Geographic reported, the parasite can move into the soil and the water that later touch the crop. Bill Marler, a lawyer and food-safety advocate, reads the scale of this one as a sign of a single efficient failure. “Given the size of what is happening and that the time frame is pretty tight, my sense is that there’s probably one product that is explaining most of this,” he told the magazine.
Blaming the farmworker misses the point
The tidy version of this story ends with the worker as the irresponsible villain, and the people who spend their careers in the fields keep trying to head that version off. They may be right. “I don’t think it’s the farm worker that is at the center of this,” Amy Liebman, chief program officer of the Migrant Clinicians Network, told Forbes. “I think it has more to do with the crops being contaminated from other sources like irrigation water and then how we process and package our food.”
About 45 percent of the water used to irrigate American crops comes from surface sources, Forbes found, drawing on the 2023 Irrigation and Water Management Survey, and those rivers and canals collect the runoff from leaking septic tanks and sewage overflows well before any harvest crew arrives. The parasite is a marker of that broken plumbing, distributed at continental scale by a food system that moves lettuce from a valley in one state to a refrigerator in another within days.
Liebman says that from a public health perspective, immigration policies are making it more dangerous, “not just for the workers themselves, but for our community,” she said. Fear keeps sick pickers in the rows and away from clinics, and it keeps the conditions that produce contamination unreported.
Part of what makes this year’s outbreak especially hard to read is that the government is watching less closely than it has in previous administrations. “By deleting cyclospora from FoodNet, the Trump administration cut off an important source of incoming information that, in this outbreak, might have provided an early warning of problems, or hints as to where the outbreak originated,” J. Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute, told Forbes. Fewer sentinels reporting means an outbreak already in the thousands can spread further before anyone traces the bag, the brand, or the field it came from.
For the clinicians who tend the people who feed the country, the alarm reaches past any single salad to what a fraying safety net delivers next. “No one’s manning the boat,” Renai Edwards, director of training at the Migrant Clinicians Network, told Forbes. “We’re just going to see more and more of these things, and bigger than they have ever been in the past, and delays that could have stopped things sooner,” Edwards said. “It will just make it all worse.”
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