Accomplished personal injury lawyer, Food Safety News founder and publisher, and internationally recognized food safety expert. Bill's advocacy work has led to testimony before Congress and his blog reaches 1M+ readers annually.
Ohio released new numbers today — 4,013 cases in 80 counties, up from 2,576 a week ago. Add the states up, one by one, all fifty of them, and the floor under this outbreak this morning is 20,927 people.
Two hundred and thirty-five meters from the processing building — roughly eight hundred feet, a three-minute walk — sits Balneario Las Fajanas, a public thermal-water bathing complex with pools, water slides, changing rooms, showers, grills and picnic shelters, open every day of the year.
I have spent more than thirty years watching companies mistake a negative product sample for innocence. Product testing finds contamination when you are lucky. Cyclospora makes you unlucky more often than most.
Fourteen years ago, the produce lobby decided it did not want anyone testing its lettuce. This summer it got a look at the world it asked for. You reaped what you sowed. It is time to plant something better.
Fifty years of outbreaks and the pattern does not move. We find out how big it was afterward, from a journal article, years later, when it is too late for the rule to matter and too late for the family.
We made the Everglades a python buffet by looking away for twenty years. We’re setting the salad bar up the same way — one defunded surveillance program at a time.
If you want to make foodborne disease disappear, don’t investigate foodborne disease. That’s not a slippery-slope warning anymore. As of July 1, 2025, it’s the operating plan.
The Cyclospora discrepancy isn't a scandal. It's a symptom. The cure is timely, transparent reporting, stronger federal-state coordination, and one accountable body to pull it together.