National Food Safety Education Month begins today. It arrives one day after CDC’s cyclosporiasis season formally closed on Aug. 31, and the closing numbers are these: 11,458 people in the multi-state outbreak tied to Taylor Farms de Mexico iceberg lettuce, across twenty states, at least 495 hospitalized with two dead in Michigan, and illness onsets running from June 14 through August 15. Nationally, CDC counts 17,180 laboratory-confirmed cases of domestically acquired cyclosporiasis since May 1, with 922 hospitalizations, and at least 11,844 more cases that still require further investigation. The comparable figure for the same stretch of 2025 was 1,180. Not one of those illnesses would have been prevented by better handwashing. Cyclosporiasis is an intestinal illness caused by the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which reaches people through food or water contaminated with human feces. And, washing produce does not remove the parasite. Also, chlorine does not kill the parasite.
The National Restaurant Association created National Food Safety Month in 1994 through its Educational Foundation, to heighten awareness about the importance of food safety education, and ServSafe still builds an annual theme and a set of free training materials around it every September. The federal government counts differently. CDC’s notice in the September 1998 MMWR describes that year as the fourth annual National Food Safety Education Month, with CDC, USDA and FDA all taking part and a theme of Keep It Clean, which would put the first one in 1995. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue signed a proclamation in 2017. FDA and FSIS run consumer campaigns every year. Whichever year you start from, this is somewhere past the 30th September, and the stated purpose has never moved: 30 days to teach people to buy, store, prepare and serve food as safely as they can.
The month was designed to teach the last person who touches the food, and that is not where this summer failed
I have no quarrel with Clean, Separate, Cook, Chill. Those four steps are real and they work on the problems they can reach. A thermometer in ground beef, a second cutting board, a refrigerator at the right temperature, hands washed before and after. Those prevent illness every day in millions of kitchens, and I would not cut a dollar from teaching them.
This month puts the whole teaching burden on the last pair of hands in the chain, and the last pair of hands has the least ability to do anything about a parasite that got onto the lettuce in a field in Guanajuato, Mexico.
What I want from government is the traceability rule Congress just delayed, and the number said out loud
The Food Traceability Rule under Section 204 of FSMA was supposed to take effect on Jan. 20, 2026. The FDA proposed pushing it back thirty months, and Congress then directed the agency not to enforce it before July 20, 2028. Lot-level records moving through the chain and retrievable in twenty-four hours are the difference between a traceback that takes days and one that takes weeks while people keep eating the contaminated food. Do not delay it a second time, and fund the agency that has to run it.
Say the number. CDC publishes 17,180 confirmed and 11,844 pending on its own Cyclospora case page and updates it weekly. Say it from a podium, in plain English, with the pending figure attached, so that nobody has to reconstruct the size of an outbreak from fifty state dashboards.
Publish where recalled food went, and leave it published. On Aug. 20 CDC removed from its consumer page the paragraph listing the states where the recalled lettuce had been distributed, on the same day it added 1,449 people to the count. The FDA still carries the distribution lists. A worried person lands on CDC.
Name the company. I have been making this argument for a very long time and I am not going to stop. Referring to entities as “Restaurant Chain A” or “Company B” protects nobody except the businesses.
Pay for the people who actually found this outbreak. It was not found in Washington. It was found by state and local epidemiologists, in Michigan and Minnesota and elsewhere, and by the public health laboratories behind them, and those programs are thin and getting thinner.
One more thing, which is not a policy item and costs nothing. If you run an agency, spend an hour with somebody this happened to. Not a listening session, not a press availability, not a photograph. An hour. I have been asking for thirty years, and I have never once seen it fail to change what the next case count means to the person reading it.
What I want from industry is to stop waiting for 2028
Nothing in that congressional directive stops a single company from having lot-level traceability tomorrow morning. The best operators already do, and they did not do it because a rule told them to. If you buy produce, you can know the ranch, the lot and the harvest date this season instead of the summer after next, and the reason to want that is entirely selfish: it is how you prove which lettuce was not yours.
Know your water. Cyclospora is a human parasite. It reaches a field through human waste in irrigation or wash water. Somebody in your chain should be able to tell you what sits upstream of the water on that ranch, what the sanitation is in the communities above it, and when any of it was last tested. If nobody can answer, that is the answer.
Recall early, recall wide, and publish your own distribution list before anyone asks you for it. Every hour of delay is more product eaten and one more step toward an outbreak nobody can attribute to anybody.
Put the food safety person in the room where the money decisions get made and give them the authority to stop the line. Dave Theno carried a photograph of Lauren Beth Rudolph, who was six years old when she died in the Jack in the Box outbreak of 1993, in his wallet for the rest of his life, and he told rooms full of executives that she was who he reported to. He changed a company and then he changed an industry. He did not do it because of a regulation or a verdict.
As I have said too often over the last thirty years, and wrote in this space during Food Safety Month in 2023, there is a business reason and a moral reason not to poison your customers. Pick either one.
What I want from academia is the test that does not exist yet
There is still no validated, field-deployable method for finding Cyclospora in irrigation water at a sensitivity that would let a grower act on the result. The FDA has laboratory methods for produce, but the parasite cannot be cultured, detection depends on molecular targets in small sample volumes, and a negative on a field’s water tells you very little. That is a research problem and it is a solvable one, and until it is solved every grower in the Salinas Valley is testing for indicator organisms that have nothing to do with the thing that made 11,458 people sick.
Genotyping is the proof that research pays. On Aug. 20, for the first time in this outbreak, the CDC said it had grouped parasites from sick people genetically and found them related, which was the first laboratory evidence of any kind in an investigation built until then entirely on interviews and traceback. That capability did not appear on its own. It came out of somebody’s laboratory. Fund more of it, make it faster, and get it into the hands of state public health labs, because a tool that only runs at Atlanta’s bench will always be six weeks behind the food.
Count the cost honestly. I hold a degree in economics and I still cannot find a defensible public number for what this summer cost growers, restaurant operators, insurers, employers and the public health system. Somebody should build it. Prevention wins the argument whenever it is compared against a real number instead of a shrug.
And train the people who will do this work. There are more open food safety jobs in this country than there are qualified people to fill them. Extension services reach growers that no rulemaking notice ever will. The Dave Theno Food Safety Fellowship puts young scientists in a room with affected families, which is its own kind of education. I teach food safety at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and I take students every year. More schools should.
What I want from consumers is the two things almost nobody does
Do the four steps – Clean, Separate, Cook, Chill. They are worth doing and they are free.
Then do the two that mattered more this year. First, if you have watery diarrhea that will not quit after several days, ask your doctor for a stool test and ask specifically about parasites, because the CDC says outright that routine stool tests do not always screen for Cyclospora. Thousands of people were sick for weeks this summer and never appeared in any count because nobody ordered the right test.
Second, call your local health department. Every outbreak named in this piece was found because a sick person answered a phone and a public health nurse wrote it down. Michigan interviewed more than 2,900 people to get where it got. Keep the package, keep the receipt, and keep the leftovers in the freezer if you still have them. You are not being a nuisance when you report. You are the surveillance system.
While you are at it, the federal dockets are open to anybody. Comments on a proposed rule from people who actually eat the food carry more weight than most people assume, and they cost nothing to file.
The best stretch this practice ever had was the one where the beef calls stopped coming
Hamburger E. coli was most of my practice from the Jack in the Box outbreak in 1993 through the ConAgra recall in 2002. Federal action after those outbreaks, declaring O157:H7 and later six more strains adulterants, and building an inspection regime around them, took that business away from me. It is the best thing that has happened in American food safety in my lifetime, and I wrote about it again yesterday because there are proposals in front of us now that would bring it back.
That is what a month like this one is actually for, and it is the only thing I have ever asked for. Put me out of business.
The season closes Monday. The month opens today. The people counted in the first are still sick in the second.
