This summer, every meal feels like a risk.
Just as the US is recovering from a major cyclospora outbreak stemming from tainted iceberg lettuce, salmonella has turned up in jalapeños, eggs, and even dog food. The jalapeño-related outbreak is now responsible for at least 431 illnesses and 57 hospitalizations in more than two dozen states. Meanwhile, a dual-pathogen outbreak of E. coli and salmonella linked to alfalfa sprouts has affected 55 people across 15 states.
But is it just your overactive imagination that these outbreaks are worse than normal?
To answer that, WIRED tallied up publicly available numbers from the Food and Drug Administration’s investigations of foodborne illnesses. The agency has identified more than 12,800 illnesses tied to foodborne outbreaks in 2026, already far surpassing the number it has identified in any year since 2020. For comparison, there were 895 cases related to foodborne outbreaks last year.
Experts say the summer of sickness is the result of chronic underfunding in food safety systems, gaps in federal food policy, and recent cuts to the country’s public health infrastructure by President Donald Trump’s administration.
“What is happening this summer just demonstrates to me the vulnerabilities in the system—and what happens when you stress the system,” says Barbara Kowalcyk, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition.
To understand how this summer became so swamped with foodborne illnesses, one needs to understand the scale of the cyclospora outbreak, which “was absolutely unprecedented,” says Jennifer McEntire, a food microbiologist and founder of the consulting firm Food Safety Strategy.
The FDA’s numbers, drawn from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s case count, establish this cyclospora outbreak as the largest the agency has investigated in the US since the 1990s. Yet even this figure undercounts how many people actually got sick, according to the CDC’s own calculations.
The FDA’s figures only count illnesses directly linked to a specific outbreak under investigation. So far, about 67 percent of the CDC’s 17,180 laboratory-confirmed cases in the US have been linked to Taylor Farms’ iceberg lettuce; the rest are linked to other outbreaks or one-off infections, which require a full-blown FDA investigation. On top of that, the CDC is aware of at least 11,844 additional cases that have either not been confirmed by a lab test or require further analysis for other reasons.
Previously, cyclospora infections were rare compared to other common foodborne bugs like salmonella and E. coli. The previously obscure pathogen typically causes a few hundred to a few thousand illnesses a year in the US. Because it is—or at least was—relatively uncommon, cyclospora isn’t included in standard panels that test for several types of gastrointestinal disease. That can mask the true size of an outbreak, on top of the many people who may have gotten diarrhea from the parasite but decided not to go to the doctor.
Cyclospora is also particularly tricky to get rid of, with its tendency to lodge itself into the crevices and folds of leafy greens, herbs, and berries. These foods are typically eaten raw, and food sanitizers aren’t effective at removing the parasite because it forms a tough, protective outer shell.
But the quirks of a parasite cannot fully explain the scale of the outbreak. Last October, WIRED reported that the CDC had reduced its staff through layoffs and buyouts by about 3,000 employees—roughly a quarter of the workforce—since Trump’s second term began. That includes people who worked in a lab that responded to cyclospora outbreaks. According to the team’s former leader, molecular parasitologist Joel Barratt, the lab’s staff was cut from 11 people to just three.
Fewer staff to handle outbreaks is compounded by the nation’s health agencies lacking leadership at the highest levels. The CDC was without a dedicated director for nearly a year, until the Senate voted in early August to confirm Erica Schwartz to the role. The FDA, meanwhile, has not had a permanent commissioner since Marty Makary resigned in May.
In 2025, the Trump administration cut roughly $12 billion in grants for state health departments, which are the first to respond to outbreaks of foodborne illness. In Michigan, the loss of these funds meant 23 fewer infectious disease workers and 123 fewer county health staff, Reuters reported in late July. Health department employees told Reuters they’ve had to pull staff from other areas—and still didn’t have the resources to investigate the thousands of cyclospora cases in the state that’s been at the center of the outbreak.
Putting new food safety policies in place could help prevent large outbreaks, but a traceability rule issued by the FDA in 2022 has yet to be implemented. The rule requires businesses that manufacture, process, pack, or hold leafy greens and other high-risk foods to maintain more detailed recordkeeping. In November, Congress voted to delay implementation of the rule until July 20, 2028. A coalition of food safety and consumer health groups sent a letter to Congress earlier this month urging members to reconsider the delay, saying the rule “would facilitate faster and more effective investigations.”
Even with the new rule, though, outbreaks like the one tied to Taylor Farms lettuce imported from Mexico would be hard to track due to a loophole. De Ann Davis, senior vice president of science at the Western Growers Association, which represents farmers in Arizona, California, Colorado, and New Mexico, says the rule does not apply to importers, brokers, or trading companies that coordinate the movement of food but do not physically possess or handle it.
“In other words, the food can come in without anybody checking that it actually has the necessary traceability information,” she says. “The importer is the one who has to make sure that the food is compliant with those regulations, but they’re not subject to the regulations.”
That makes tracing foodborne illness outbreaks tied to foreign products difficult, especially if the original supplier isn’t keeping detailed records. “We are relying on those foreign countries to be informed about the regulations of the US, but they are not subject to the regulations of the US,” Davis says.
There are also lapses in food safety inspections that predate the Trump administration. A January 2025 report from the US Government Accountability Office found that the FDA conducted an average of 917 foreign inspections per year from 2018 to 2023, far fewer than the 8,353 domestic inspections it conducted over the same period. But CBS News reported that inspections have fallen even further since last year’s budget cuts. Taylor Farms’ Mexico facility linked to the cyclospora outbreak has not been inspected since 2019, according to CBS.
In a statement to WIRED, the FDA says that it asked for expanded state and local information sharing, as well as foreign food facility fee collection authority, in its 2027 budget proposal. The agency says that its “robust response” identifying the source of the cyclospora outbreak “demonstrates exactly how the agency’s risk-based oversight system is designed to work,” adding that under the Trump administration, the FDA has “increased the number of unannounced foreign inspections and is actively expanding staffing at foreign posts.”
“Suggesting that the FDA’s ability to protect the food supply can be measured by a single inspection statistic ignores the agency’s comprehensive oversight system,” the statement continues.
Beyond cyclospora, McEntire says the other outbreaks of foodborne illness are still concerning even if they’re smaller in size than the cyclospora crisis. “Multiple visible outbreaks with different organisms associated with very different types of products is kind of unusual, not unprecedented, but certainly unusual,” she says.
Contaminated jalapeños have caused the biggest salmonella outbreak in the US since 2024, when an outbreak of the bacteria in cucumbers caused 551 illnesses that summer. (That’s far below the worst outbreak, though, when an estimated 224,000 people fell ill in 1994 after eating Schwan’s ice cream.)
It’s also rare to find two different disease-causing pathogens in the same product at the same time, which is the case with alfalfa sprouts contaminated with E. coli and salmonella. The outbreak has caused 55 illnesses, with two people getting infected with both pathogens. Everything Sprouts is recalling certain lots of alfalfa sprouts sold under the Calco and Everything Sprouts brands at retailers and grocery stores. The sprouts were grown in a hydroponic facility in Minnesota.
Kowalcyk warns that the summer of sickness isn’t over yet, though the calendar is about to turn to fall. Many pathogens thrive in hot, humid environments. Plenty of warm weather is still ahead, and what’s shaping up to be the strongest El Niño on record could jack up temperatures in some locations even further. That means anyone looking for peace of mind at the drive-thru or in the produce aisle after Labor Day may not find it.
“A lot of our foodborne illness cases peak in August, September, even early October,” Kowalcyk says. “So we’re just in the beginning.”
