The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that the massive cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to four more states has expanded to nine states, with 1,947 cases now counted in the multistate cluster. The CDC said Michigan and Ohio remain the hardest hit, while the FDA is still testing whether other growers played a role.
Gwen Biggerstaff, the CDC deputy director of the department of foodborne, waterborne and environmental diseases, said the agency is still pulling together reports from state investigators. “We’re getting more complete case data that covers the range of the outbreak,” she said Friday. “States are completing interviews with people, and we’re filling in the data.”
Michigan and Ohio counts
Michigan has had nearly 8,000 infections, far more than any other state in the broader nationwide tally. Ohio has 2,596 cases, and the CDC sent three staffers there to help with the investigation. New York has had 632 cases since May, while North Carolina has reported 561 during the same time frame.
The CDC said outbreaks in Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania have been connected to cases in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia, along with Michigan. That adds geographic spread to a count that had already reached nearly 12,000 confirmed or suspected cases nationwide.
Taylor Farms de Mexico
The FDA has pointed to shredded iceberg lettuce sourced from Taylor Farms de Mexico as the likely source, and Taylor Farms voluntarily recalled the product from the U.S. market. Many people who got sick said they had eaten at Taco Bell in June before the waves of cases took off, and the restaurant chain pulled lettuce from its menu before the recall.
Kari Irvin, the FDA deputy director of the Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation Network, said last week that the agency needs the case count to judge the recall’s reach. “We know it went to many states, to many points of sale,” she said. “because it will help tell us if the recall is enough, that they’ve recovered all products that need to be removed from the market.”
FDA outbreak investigations
Irvin said Friday, “The data that we have now really continues to home in on growers that were already identified.” She also said, “We have multiple investigations of cyclospora open,” as the FDA keeps working on whether additional growers were involved. The CDC’s latest count shows the outbreak is wider than first reported, but the case data still points back to the same produce supply chain.
That leaves one immediate practical question for shoppers and restaurants handling fresh produce: whether the recall removed every contaminated product tied to the outbreak. The current numbers say the outbreak is still active across nine states, and the investigation is still aimed at finding whether anything else reached the market.
