Kyle Diamantas, the acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs, said Tuesday that Americans should feel confident eating fresh produce. He said it as his agency finalized its guidance on the preparation and packaging of fresh-cut fruits and vegetables, and he said it, in Reuters’ own framing, amid ongoing foodborne outbreaks. CTV ran the wire story under a headline that gets to the point faster than the story does: the acting FDA chief urges confidence in lettuce.
Here is the rest of what Tuesday held. CDC’s weekly update put laboratory-confirmed, domestically acquired Cyclosporacases at 13,895, with at least another 10,455 still needing further investigation. That is 24,350 people in the federal count alone. Add up what the state health departments have published on their own dashboards and the floor sits above 28,000, with at least 688 hospitalizations and two deaths in Michigan.
CDC printed the comparison itself: 1,180 cases in the same window a year ago. And CDC changed the words it uses to describe this outbreak. It is now a large multistate outbreak linked to processed iceberg lettuce from central Mexico. Processed is a new word in that sentence, and it points at a facility rather than a field.
Those two things happened on the same day, from the same government, about the same lettuce.
I want to be fair to the document the acting Commissioner was standing on, because it deserves better than the press release around it. The final fresh-cut produce guidance is the best thing FDA has published on this subject in eighteen years, and parts of it are genuinely useful. It says in plainly that Cyclospora is a known or reasonably foreseeable biological hazard in fresh salad mixes containing lettuce and carrots, in berries, in fresh basil and in fresh cilantro. It says fecally contaminated agricultural water and fecal deposits from infected field workers are currently considered reasonable routes of transfer. It tells processors that rewashing product that ran through out-of-spec water is not an acceptable corrective action.
And buried in the validation chapter it says the thing the acting Commissioner did not say out loud on Tuesday. FDA is not currently aware of any antimicrobial that would significantly minimize or prevent Cyclospora cross-contamination and be suitable for use on fresh-cut produce. Elsewhere it says a wash-water process control is not a kill step, and that antimicrobials do not meaningfully reduce pathogens attached to produce or internalized in the tissue.
The guidance is also non-binding. No effective date, no compliance period, no obligation. It took eight years to move from draft to final, and the Listeria guidance it cross-references has been a draft since January 2017. The trade press filed within hours and repeated the agency’s framing without ever reaching the no-antimicrobial sentence.
That is the difference I keep running into this summer. A guidance document that concedes the wash does not work on the parasite is a piece of helpful leadership. Standing next to it and telling twenty-eight thousand sick people’s neighbors to feel confident is unhelpful cheerleading.
Look at what the Secretary of Health and Human Services has actually said about this outbreak, because it is short. On July 21, at a briefing called to announce a health care fraud action, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked about it and said the outbreak was “under control.” He said extensive epidemiological forensics had identified the source and the companies involved had recalled. Asked whether surveillance cuts had slowed the response, he said those criticisms are invalid, that there had been no cuts to the surveillance program, and that the FoodNet reductions were for redundant surveillance and every state would say so. That was three weeks ago. The confirmed count on the day he said it was a small fraction of where it stands tonight, and he has not said anything about the outbreak since.
What he has done since is nothing. The department proposed a rule requiring companies to notify FDA of their own GRAS determinations, open for comment 120 days, and submitted the government’s first proposed definition of ultra-processed foods for final review. He called the pair historic. He said parents should not need a chemistry degree to understand what their children are eating, and he is right about that. Both are defensible policy and I have argued for the first one for years. Neither touches parasites, imported produce, traceability, or surveillance. Neither would have shortened this summer by a single day. In the eleventh week of the largest Cyclospora outbreak in American history, the department’s major food announcement was about food chemistry.
The President has commented once. On July 24, Peter Doocy asked him when it would be safe to eat lettuce again. He said he had not thought about it, said it was the first time anyone had asked him, asked Doocy whether he had been eating lettuce lately, and then said he would put a major tariff on Mexico because of the lettuce. That was eighteen days ago, and he has not returned to it. A tariff is not a food safety measure. Taylor Farms is a California company. A tariff tests no water, trains no harvest crew, and counts no sick person. When the man at the top of the government is asked when the food will be safe and his honest answer is that he has not thought about it, that is not a gaffe to score points off. It is a description of where this sits on the list.
Others in the building have gone further than being uninformed. Calley Means, a senior White House adviser, posted on X within the past week that the concern over this outbreak is hysteria funded by junk food companies to make people eat less real food, and that a foodborne illness advocacy group is a front feeding quotes to reporters. The group he was pointing at works with families whose children died of foodborne illness. Two people are dead in Michigan and better than twenty-eight thousand are counted sick. Calling that manufactured is not a communications strategy. It is a statement about how seriously the White House takes it.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, the same company at the center of the lettuce outbreak recalled prepared salsas, guacamoles and dips made with jalapeños from Sinaloa, tied to a Salmonella Javiana outbreak that has sickened at least 345 people across 27 states. Two nationwide outbreaks, one supplier, three weeks apart. Confidence is not the emotion the moment calls for.
The people who have been substantive about this are almost all outside the executive branch or below the political level of it. Eleven letters have gone from Congress to CDC, FDA and HHS since the middle of July, five from the House and six from the Senate, and I have not found a published answer to any of them. Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote as ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and asked the acting Commissioner for every communication between FDA and the White House about this outbreak and about Taylor Farms. That deadline is Thursday, and PSI is the one committee on this list with subpoena capacity behind it. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand wrote to Diamantas and to the then-acting CDC director asking how CDC intends to keep a reliable baseline now that this parasite has come off mandatory FoodNet tracking. Every one of the eleven letters was signed by a Democrat, which is a problem of its own, because none of what they are asking for is partisan.
Leadership starts with doing something useful instead of saying useless things. On August 7 I published fifteen things FDA and CDC could do about Cyclospora, sorted by how long each one takes, because I was tired of being told that complaining is all I do. Four of the fifteen need no rulemaking, no appropriation and no act of Congress. Here are the four I would do first, and I would do all four this week. Two of them belong to CDC alone, which means the new director could start on them tomorrow. The season CDC defines closes on August 31, which is twenty days from now.
1. Say one number out loud and define what is inside it. There are four figures in circulation for the same disease in the same week — the outbreak page, the confirmed count, the confirmed count plus the unconfirmed, and what the fifty state health departments actually report. Every one of them is defensible and no two of them describe the same thing, which is why the public hears a different number depending on which reporter called which office. Pick a figure, say in one sentence what it counts and what it leaves out, and refresh it on a published cadence. An agency that will not state the size of a problem cannot expect to be believed when it says the problem is handled.
2. Publish the genotypes. CDC has had targeted amplicon deep sequencing for this parasite since 2018. It is built, it is paid for, and it is the only tool in existence that can tell us whether the lettuce outbreak, the other federal Cyclosporafiles carrying illnesses with no named food, and North Carolina’s separate parsley and cilantro signal are one event or four. No state can answer that on its own. Nothing has been published. This is the cheapest item on the list and probably the most valuable.
3. Go look at the water and name the parasite in the rule that governs it. Tuesday’s guidance tells processors that when the antimicrobial cannot control a hazard, they must handle it with supply-chain controls, which routes them to the produce safety rules. The only numeric microbial criterion in the pre-harvest agricultural water rule is generic E. coli, and FDA’s own material on this organism says indicator testing will not find it. Meanwhile, after the 2013 outbreak traced to the same company and the same region, the firm resumed production on a stated commitment to sample its products and its water, and FDA’s own environmental assessment told it to determine whether this parasite is a reasonably likely hazard and to re-evaluate the wash. Nobody has ever published whether any of that happened. Ask, then send someone to sample the irrigation water, and publish the result whichever way it comes out.
4. Put the traceability rule back on its original schedule. Congress passed it in 2011. It was supposed to take effect this year and has been pushed to 2028. Seventeen years after the statute, we traced this lettuce with spreadsheets and phone calls.
None of the four would have prevented this outbreak. The contamination happened in a field in central Mexico in the spring, weeks before the first American got sick, and no surveillance system counts a case that has not happened yet. What they would have done is make this outbreak shorter, smaller and legible — found sooner, described honestly while it was running, understood afterward. And not one of the four is a partisan measure. The traceability rule was written under one administration and delayed under two.
I would rather hear an acting Commissioner say that his own agency published a document on Tuesday admitting there is no wash that controls this parasite, that the traceability rule he needs is three years away, and here is which of these he is going to do about it. I would rather hear a new CDC director say one number in her first month and stand behind it. I would rather hear a Secretary say the July number was wrong and here is the real one. I would rather hear a President say he has been briefed. I would rather hear that one of them had spent an hour with a family. Nobody comes out of that hour able to say a thing is under control. Those are harder sentences to say. They are also the ones that would actually restore confidence.
