Michigan usually sees about fifty cases of this a year. Right now it has more than 1,251, and the number doubled in a single week.
The explosive diarrhea parasite spreading across the country is called Cyclospora cayetanensis, and it is not new. It is a microscopic parasite that gets into the intestinal tract, almost always through contaminated fresh produce like lettuce, herbs and green onions. It is not spread person to person. What it does is brutal and it is exactly what it sounds like. Watery, sudden, often explosive diarrhea that can go on for weeks or even months if it is not treated, along with severe cramping, bloating, nausea, exhaustion and real weight loss.
As of Friday, NBC News counted more than 3,000 reported cases nationally. The CDC had confirmed 843 across 31 states. Michigan, New York, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina have been hit hardest. Roughly twenty people have been hospitalized. Investigators at the CDC and FDA are pulling grocery receipts and food histories trying to find the source, and so far they have not found it. Some Taco Bell locations in Michigan pulled cilantro, pico de gallo and guacamole off the menu rather than wait for an answer.
Here is the part that should make you sit up.
In July 2025, the CDC scaled back a program called FoodNet, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network. It had existed for three decades as a partnership between federal and state health officials, and its whole job was to actively track foodborne pathogens rather than wait for people to get sick and hope somebody connected the dots. It required monitoring of eight pathogens. That was cut down to two.
The two that survived are salmonella and Shiga toxin producing E. coli. The six that were dropped are campylobacter, listeria, shigella, vibrio, Yersinia, and cyclospora.
Cyclospora. The one currently in 31 states.
The agency’s position at the time was that FoodNet was duplicative. Craig Hedberg, a professor in environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota, told his school’s infectious disease center that cutting those funds normalizes the idea that foodborne disease surveillance is expensive and unimportant, when it is actually the foundation of the entire food safety system and needs more investment, not less.
That was a year ago. Experts said out loud that this was coming.
The cut landed in the same stretch when the Trump administration was slashing federal health and science agencies under the banner of government efficiency, and while Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was pushing career scientists and researchers out of their jobs. You cannot find what you are not looking for, and the country stopped looking.
To be fair about what is and is not established, the CDC says there is no evidence yet of a single multistate outbreak linking all of these cases, and that it is not prepared to call the current numbers definitively unusual while the investigation is open. Cases do climb every summer between May and August because that is when people eat the most fresh produce. But the country has already blown past 1,000 cases only halfway through peak season, and last year’s total for the entire year was around 2,700. We are already past 3,000.
What you should actually do with this information is simple. If you have had watery diarrhea that will not quit, cramping, and unexplained fatigue or weight loss, go see a doctor and ask specifically about cyclospora, because it will not clear up on its own and it is treatable once it is identified. It is also worth knowing that rinsing produce does not reliably get rid of this particular parasite, so washing your lettuce harder is not the fix anybody wants it to be.
The fix was the surveillance program. And it got cut a year ago.
