President Donald Trump has a major problem with explosive diarrhea on his hands.
On Tuesday, HHS secretary Robert Kennedy Jr declared that the ongoing outbreak of cyclosporiasis — a non-lethal but extremely unpleasant gut infection caused by the Cyclospora cayetanensis parasite — was “under control.”
“We’ve identified the source of the outbreak, and the companies that are involved have implemented a recall,” he said, without elaborating any further or naming the companies.
But considering that cases are still rising, the situation is very much not looking under control. According to a Tuesday update by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 4,173 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases of cyclosporiasis since May 1. There are an additional 7,400 cases that have yet to be confirmed, many of which were reported in Michigan and Ohio.
Those tallies appear to be underestimating the scale of the problem considerably. In Michigan alone, state officials warned on Wednesday that there were 7,171 cyclosporiasis cases since June 22, up from 6,571 on July 21, suggesting the outbreak is only getting started.
Cases reported by the Ohio Department of Health tripled to 1,192 cases in its July 16 update, compared to June 20 — another sign that the situation is getting worse, not better.
And that’s just the data we know about. Identifying the parasite is notoriously difficult in a lab, making it particularly difficult to trace, and requiring extensive detective work by health officials.
Yet the public messaging regarding news about the outbreak has been severely lacking and downright confusing. Over the same weekend, the Food and Drug Administration said it had determined the culprit, bagged shredded lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms, one of Taco Bell’s lead suppliers — only to claim that the results were a “false positive” less than a day later.
Taylor Farms, which continues to “voluntarily” recall its tainted lettuce, celebrated the update, claiming the FDA had “apologized to us” in a since-deleted Monday statement.
Just hours later, the situation flipped on its head once again, with the FDA saying that “FDA’s traceback investigation and outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms locations in central Mexico.”
There are plenty of reasons to be highly skeptical of the government narrative. The Trump administration maintains a cozy relationship with Taylor Farms, a company that has made a major donation to Trump’s political action committee, MAGA Inc.
The White House has since vehemently denied accusations from the media that it may be colluding with Taylor Farms behind the scenes, with the Health and Human Services Department calling them “FAKE NEWS” in a Monday statement — the kind of knee-jerk reaction that’s bound to invite even more scrutiny.
Then there’s the Trump administration’s gutting of key public health programs that could make truly getting the cyclosporiasis outbreak under control. Budget cuts have led to massive layoffs at the USDA, CDC, and FDA. Key food inspection and surveillance programs ahve been terminated. A team specifically dedicated to tracking cyclospora was slashed by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency last year from 11 to just three people.
In short, while Kennedy claims the situation is under control, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. Cases are on the rise and even the evidence behind FDA’s leading suspect appears to be shaky, by the agency’s own admission.
It’s the perfect storm of short-sighted austerity measures, chummy business relationships, and poor public messaging by officials who are unable to speak from a place of authority and conviction.
Put simply, Trump’s diarrhea troubles are likely only getting started.
There’s something undeniably fishy about the Trump administration’s handling of the rising outbreak of an explosive diarrhea-causing parasite — and we’re not talking about tainted iceberg lettuce.
On Saturday, the FDA announced that it had found traces of the Cyclospora cayetanensis parasite — which more than likely won’t kill you, but will almost certainly cause weeks of violent diarrhea — in samples of bagged shredded lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms, one of Taco Bell’s lead suppliers.
One day later, the agency suddenly reversed its decision, announcing that its test results were a false positive, seemingly exonerating Taylor Farms. The company is still carrying out a voluntary recall of the offending greens, a move first announced on Friday.
The unexpected twists and turns of the devastating outbreak highlight how the Trump administration is struggling to get coherent messaging out to the American people, a public health disaster facilitated by massive health budget cuts and major layoffs at the FDA, USDA, and CDC. We still don’t know exactly how many people are affected, numbers that vary wildly depending on whether you ask the CDC or individual states. It’s a confounding mess, compounded by the fact that the parasite is notoriously difficult to trace in a lab.
There are plenty of reasons to be suspicious of the FDA’s baffling reversal on Sunday. For one, the Trump administration’s relationship with the embattled food supplier goes way back. Case in point, Taylor Farms made a mysterious $1 million donation to the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc on March 26, 2025, as first spotted by lawyer and public health policy leader Matthew Cortland — six days before the FDA loosened food traceability rules which could’ve helped prevent outbreaks like the current one.
The company appears to have considerable sway in Washington, DC. On July 17, a day before the FDA announced it had found traces of the parasite, the New York Times reported that Taylor Farms representatives had met with White House and FDA officials the day before to discuss what the company viewed as “shortfalls in the FDA and CDC’s outbreak response process.”
While it’s unclear whether the supplier successfully strong-armed the FDA into going back on its initial claims of having found traces of the parasite, the timelines are certainly suspect. According to the NYT, Taylor Farms had also hired lobbyist Trent Morse, who served as the deputy director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office before he resigned in September.
The story only gets stranger after the FDA issued its mea culpa. In the early morning hours of Monday, Taylor Farms published an “update” — which has since been deleted for an unknown reason — claiming that the FDA had “apologized to us” while trying to reassure customers that “all other Taylor Farms products… are not involved in the recall.”
Less than 12 hours later, the FDA once again pulled a 180.
“To clarify, this false-positive lab sample DOES NOT change the basis for FDA’s ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms,” the agency tweeted on Monday.
“FDA’s traceback investigation and outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms locations in central Mexico,” the statement reads. “FDA will continue to work with federal and state partners to investigate this multistate outbreak and ensure products implicated in this outbreak have been removed from the market.”
It’s hard to rule out that White House officials were trying to vindicate Taylor Farms, considering the Trump administration has long been accused of giving major MAGA Inc donors favorable “pay for access” treatment. Taylor Farms’ willingness to recall the lettuce alone speaks volumes.
Naturally, the White House is now accusing the media of putting far too much of a spin on the story.
“This is how the FAKE NEWS works: imply collusion, ignore the facts,” the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees the FDA, tweeted on Monday, replying to reporting by Meidas Touch about Taylor Farms’ PAC donation. “Nothing influences our decisions except science and the safety of the American people.”
By Tuesday, the White House had already declared victory, with HHS secretary and notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr claiming that the outbreak was “under control.” He vaguely referred to “companies that are involved,” which had “implemented a recall” — but never mentioned Taylor Farms by name.
Most of the nation may want nothing to do with Taylor Farms and its shredded iceberg lettuce, which was recalled in dozens of states for potentially being contaminated with a parasite that turns your bowels into a garden hose.
Not so for the Amazon-owned Whole Foods, which is either hoping to capitalize on the controversy or proceeding as if nothing happened.
Over the weekend, we noticed that one of the grocery retailer’s locations in New York City was selling Taylor Farms’ shredded iceberg at a steep 50 percent discount — which, from an optics point of view, is absolutely extraordinary.
Is this an indictment of our country’s ruthless opportunism, and by extension, capitalism at large? Is it a total nonstory? If you’re unlucky enough, you’ll have plenty of time to ponder those questions on the porcelain throne. Many on social media just seemed to think it was a mix of funny and appalling.
“The cost is on the back end,” someone joked. “Discount diarrhea,” chimed another. Others were outraged that the location was still selling the stuff.
“They’re seriously not pulling that off the shelf,” one fumed. “For SHAME.”
The Food and Drug Administration narrowed the culprit down to a Taylor Farms facility in Mexico. So far, Taylor Farms has voluntarily recalled its Mexico products containing shredded iceberg lettuce from 27 states, including Michigan — the epicenter of the outbreak, where over 6,100 people are believed to be infected — Florida, Texas, and North Carolina.
New York state is not currently one of them, so Whole Foods isn’t obligated to pull the products from its shelves (or at least as obligated as is possible under what is technically a voluntary recall). Still, the recall has been expanded at least once already, so it’s not impossible that it could include more states in the near future. A Whole Foods representative declined to go on record, but insisted that the bag of lettuce in question was sourced from the USA, not Mexico, adding that the chain doesn’t carry any of the recalled products.
Tracing the provenance of food products can be pretty byzantine. It’s not clear at this point if Taylor Farms supplied lettuce to companies in states affected by the recall who then distributed that lettuce again more widely, the New York Times noted. Not even the FDA has “distribution information or a list of customers who received” the recalled product since Taylor Farms hasn’t provided it, it said on its website — something it’s not legally required to do.
It’s even more confusing to the public. Taylor Farms doesn’t share which stores and restaurants it directly supplied its products too, so consumers have to do their own detective work, or rely on those locations voluntarily declaring that they used those products.
All that’s to say that there’s a lot of uncertainty over what lettuce is safe and what isn’t. The safest thing to do in this environment, probably, is to just abstain from shredded lettuce entirely. But you have to admit, isn’t that Whole Foods 50 percent discount tempting? Maybe if you’re used to paying outrageous prices for a bag of mushy leaves.
In a stunning reversal on Sunday, the Food and Drug Administration said that lettuce samples from Taylor Farms did not, after all, test positive for the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which is behind the rising outbreak of explosive diarrhea sweeping the nation.
Health officials have been racing to control the intestinal infection, which fortunately is not deadly, but can cause weeks of violently watery diarrhea.
By Saturday, the FDA said it had found traces of the parasite in shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms — one of Taco Bell’s lead suppliers — only to change its mind just one day later.
“To be clear, at this moment, FDA has not identified a single positive product test result for cyclospora,” a Taylor Fresh Foods spokesperson told Reuters in a statement.
The bizarre 180 leaves far more questions than answers. And further muddying the waters was lawyer and public health policy leader Matthew Cortland’s stunning discovery about the food supplier’s relationship with the Trump administration.
In a post on Patreon, Cortland found that Taylor Farms had made a $1 million donation to the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc on March 26, 2025. That’s just six days after the FDA announced it was pushing back the implementation of its “Food Traceability Rule” by 30 months.
The rule, which was originally meant to go into effect on January 20 of this year, would’ve established “traceability recordkeeping requirements beyond those in existing regulations, for persons who manufacture, process, pack, or hold foods,” according to the regulator’s website.
Considering the effort would’ve allowed, in the words of the FDA, for the “faster identification and removal of potentially contaminated food from the market, resulting in fewer foodborne illnesses and deaths,” the agency’s decision to move back the compliance date raised eyebrows. (Congress even doubled down earlier this year, forbidding any funds to be appropriated to enforce the Food Traceability Rule before July 20, 2028.)
Where all of this leaves the ongoing outbreak of explosive diarrhea is tough to say. As Cortland points out, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has only acknowledged a small fraction of the cases of the illness so far. As of Friday, that’s 1,644 cases across five states. However, compared to reported tallies from individual states — Michigan alone has reported over 6,000 cases as of Monday — that’s likely vastly underestimating a more widespread phenomenon.
One reason for the discrepancy could be the difficulty of confirming the presence of the parasite with a lab test, a process that requires painstakingly dying eggs and then examining samples under a microscope. The parasite can’t be grown in a lab, greatly hampering scientists’ efforts to trace the outbreak.
“You’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” food-safety professional Jennifer McEntire, who consults for Taylor Fresh Foods, told the Wall Street Journal. “With E. coli and salmonella if you find it you can make the needle bigger. That doesn’t happen for cyclospora.”
And chances are that the situation could get even messier as the parasite spreads. The Trump administration’s FDA and USDA have lost tens of thousands of workers last year amidst budget cuts. A food surveillance program called FoodNet that monitored eight common foodborne pathogens is now no longer required to keep tabs on the cyclospora parasite. A team responsible for identifying parasitic outbreaks across the US was cut from 11 people to just three in September, as CNN reports.
For now, Taylor Fresh Foods will still have to recall its iceberg lettuce — despite the FDA now claiming the samples it viewed did not test positive after all.
The world has been obsessed with what Gen Z is or isn’t doing.
They’re not having sex, apparently. They don’t go out. And let’s not forget drinking: for the young twenty-somethings to forgo damaging their livers and brains by imbibing poison as prolifically as their predecessors clearly shows a lack of respect — and that they don’t know anything about having a good time.
But it appears that in the end, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. New research from beverage retail research group IWSR shows that Gen Z are now catching up on boozing like a friend knocking back a whole row of shots after showing up later than they said they would.
“They’re late to the party, they’re not skipping the party,” IWSR president Marten Lodewijks told Business Insider.
According to the survey, 74 percent of Gen-Zers say they’ve had at least one drink over the past six months, a huge leap from 66 percent just three three years ago. The heaviest drinkers were Millennials at 81 percent, and the lightest were Baby Boomers at 71 percent. Gen X, fittingly, were in the middle at 77 percent.
The legal drinking age youths are catching up, but their drinking habits look a little different from their elders’. They’re drinking more cocktails than any other generation, with 84 saying that they had a mixed drink in the past six months. Gen-Zers were also the most likely to follow government health guidance on alcohol (49 percent), and the most likely to say they drank alcohol with five or more people on their last occasion (18 percent).
In a statement, Lodewijks declared that Gen-Z’s reputation as the generation of moderation “is now conclusively debunked.”
“The evidence demonstrates that Gen Z consumers enjoy drinking at roughly the same levels as the rest of society,” he added.
In retrospect, it always should’ve been clear why Gen-Zers didn’t drink as much. Shifting attitudes towards drinking culture may be part of it, sure, but what almost certainly had the biggest part to say was the COVID-19 pandemic that stopped them from going out around when many of them just hit their legal drinking age.
“They were literally coming of age at a point in which everything got shut down,” Lodewijks told BI.
Wonderful. With their boozing now in line, what other Gen-Z habits can we worry about? Their addiction to romanticAI companions? We cast a mournful glance towards the bottle.
Since riding Donald Trump’s coattails to power, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has taken his haphazard anti-vaccine views and enshrined them as a core tenet of US health policy.
According to 16 current and former health officials who spoke to Reuters, RFK Jr has taken much more drastic measures to push his anti-vaccine agenda than was previously known.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, two officials told the news agency that RFK approached National Institute of Health director Jay Bhattacharya earlier this year with a proposal to spend up to $5 billion in tax dollars to establish links between vaccines and autism.
As Reuters notes, that kind of spending would encompass ten percent of the NIH’s annual budget, a massive waste that would fly in the face of decades of established science showing vaccines definitively don’t cause autism.
“He’s an anti-vaccine activist. That’s who he is. That’s who he’s been for 20 years,” Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia told Reuters. “To expect that as secretary of Health and Human Services he’d be anything other than that is wishful thinking.”
It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time RFK Jr attempted to twist the science to link vaccines with autism. Earlier this year, the US Department of Health and Human Services was caught spending $1.6 million funding a study on hepatitis B vaccines conducted by controversial Danish researchers Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn.
Had the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention — the public health arm of the Africa Union — not stepped in to stop the RFK-backed study, researchers would have withheld inoculations from thousands of newborn infants in Guinea-Bissau.
The situation drew notable comparisons to the Tuskegee Experiment, a highly unethical medical experiment that used hundreds of Black men as guinea pigs to study the long-term effects of syphilis. Despite the fact that effective treatment was available, nearly 400 men spent decades without treatment, suffering life-long consequences at the hands of manipulative researchers.
Though the Tuskegee Experiment may not have produced any medical breakthroughs or scientific discoveries, its cruel legacy seemingly lives on as inspiration for RFK and his HHS cronies.
The next time you’re checking into a hospital, it’s possible that your nurse may actually be 8,000 miles away.
That’s the reality at a growing number of hospitals throughout the US and the world, which are turning to low-paid telehealth workers in the Philippines to help fill in the duty roster. As it is for remote driving and AI data labeling, the Philippines has become a wellspring of cheap labor for transnational healthcare companies, which are more than happy to exploit a country where millions of people live in poverty.
Stunning reporting by Rest of World detailed the lives of some of the 210,000 full-time Filipino workers employed in remote healthcare. This new class of workers makes up for a massive shortage of almost 80,000 registered nurses in the US.
One of the workers, Alice, is a licensed nurse working in Quezon City, a city of three million people in the Philippines. In 2019, she signed on with a telehealth company providing mental health and substance abuse treatment to US-based patients in California and New Mexico. Alice told RoW she earns $5 an hour, five times as much as the hospital job she left behind.
“We have this virtual clinic that functions like a lobby where patients check in,” Alice explained, “and then we traffic or triage them and send them to each of the providers’ personal Zoom room.”
To get a job communing with US patients through a screen, a Filipino worker simply needs to have a medical degree — it doesn’t matter what kind. While it’s likely that many telehealth recruits come from healthcare administration backgrounds, RoW notes that about 30 percent of the people employed in these jobs are trained nurses or other medical professionals.
The result is a scenario where tens of thousands of healthcare workers are physically present in their communities, but spend their days caring for patients half a world away in a desperate bid to pay the bills. Already facing a mounting shortage of trained healthcare professionals, the Filipino people have watched as telehealth corporations court the remaining hospital workers to oversee care for patients in the US.
“If they can’t go abroad, remote nursing is the next best thing because local wages are so low,” Nico Uba, secretary general of the group Filipino Nurses United told RoW. “Then local hospitals are left understaffed and overworked.”
The companies running this insidious scheme prey on two sets of healthcare workers on opposite ends of the world: the underpaid Filipino, for whom a wage of $5 an hour is much higher than the national average, and the overworked American, for whom a 50-hour work week is practically a vacation.
The remote healthcare industry is well aware of this tension, and is happy to take advantage. As JL Botor, president of the Healthcare Information Management Association of the Philippines told RoW, US hospitals can save up to 70 percent of their overhead costs by hiring Filipino workers instead.
In all, Botor notes that the country is a “clinical process outsourcing powerhouse,” as well as “a premier global hub for supporting overstressed international healthcare systems.”
On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had linked the outbreak of cyclosporiasis, an infection notorious for inducing explosive diarrhea, to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms that was supplied to Taco Bell.
Per the reporting, Taco Bell said it was voluntarily pulling the lettuce from select states where it received the contaminated produce: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. An announcement from the CDC warned the public not to eat food items with shredded lettuce from Taco Bell, but hasn’t identified Taylor Farms as the source.
But while Taco Bell may have served the tainted lettuce, it would be remiss to lay all of the blame on the fast food chain (although one aggrieved customer is already suing it after contracting the illness).
The contamination occurred at the farms or facilities where the food was processed, from a single supplier in Mexico, Food and Drug Administration officials said. The supplier, Taylor Farms, has been involved in previous outbreaks, including another outbreak of cyclosporiasis in a salad mix in 2013.
Taco Bell, to its credit, also immediately pulled its ingredients from some of its locations last week as soon as it learned about the situation, according to local reports.
And then there’s the broader political context that many experts are drawing attention to: how the Trump administration has slashed funding to the CDC and paralyzed the nation’s food safety bodies.
Last February, shortly after Trump took office, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) dissolved its National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which provided scientific guidance on food safety policy. Ryan Cooper at The Prospect notes that the committee was working on advice for foodborne illness outbreaks before being terminated. The FDA also shut down its National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection.
Not spared during the wave of cuts that wreaked the federal government, the USDA lost over 20,000 workers last year, with 913 of them coming from its Food Safety Inspection Service.
Last year, the CDC — which has lost some 3,000 employees under Trump — scaled back its food surveillance program called FoodNet that monitored eight common foodborne pathogens, changing it so that surveillance of the cyclospora parasite that causes cyclosporiasis was optional.
Dan Jernigan, a former director of CDC’s Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told the Washington Post that the decision was made because funding for food safety had not been maintained over the past few years. That the US is now on track to have more cyclospora cases this year than any previous year in history is likely no coincidence.
Jernigan left the agency last August in protest of Trump ousting its then director Susan Monarez and the policies of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. But he said that the Trump cuts would have little impact on the ongoing outbreak, adding that FoodNet wasn’t designed for real-time outbreak detection or response.
As the WaPo reporting notes, federal and state health authorities have insisted that the cyclosporiasis investigation hasn’t been impeded because the parasite is still reportable to a separate national database. Still, Jernigan said that scaling back FoodNet wasn’t inconsequential.
“Routine outbreak investigators are the firefighters responding to a specific blaze. FoodNet is the citywide system that tracks how often fires occur and whether the overall risk is rising,” he told WaPo. “Removing cyclosporiasis from FoodNet does not take the firefighters away from the current outbreak, but it does remove part of the system that tells us how large the problem is and whether it is getting worse over time.”
Cyclosporiasis is a particularly tough illness to track. Symptoms can take weeks to present, making it difficult for health officials to trace back where sufferers were infected. A recent Wired piece drew attention to how many people may be wrongly misdiagnosing themselves as news of the diarrhea dilemma spread across social media.
Linda Yancey, an infectious disease specialist at Memorial Hermann Health System in Texas, warned that large outbreaks like this could become more common.
“Unfortunately with so many budget cuts, every federal agency is hurting for personnel and resources,” she told Time Magazine earlier this month. “We could be at greater risk of foodborne infections because the FDA is so understaffed and underfunded right now.”
So far, Michigan, the epicenter of the outbreak, has alone tallied over 4,300 cases of infection, while nationwide there could be 7,000 cases, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has only confirmed 1,600 of them.
Apocryphal tales of its meals causing the runs have plagued Taco Bell since time immemorial. But this latest parasitic outbreak is something else entirely.
As the Washington Post reports, federal and state authorities are investigating whether the fast food chain is behind the outbreak of explosive diarrhea cases across the country — further cementing its scatological legacy.
The illness, caused by the cyclosporiasis parasite, has sickened as many as 5,100 people across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Michigan, which appears to be the epicenter of the outbreak, over 3,700 people have been infected, state authorities said.
Taco Bell’s suspected role in the outbreak comes after reports that the chain’s Michigan locations began pulling some of its ingredients. Signs in front of the restaurants stated that they were no longer serving lettuce, cilantro, onion, pico de gallo, and guacamole due to a “nationwide recall,” though what recall they were referring to is unclear.
Health officials have so far struggled to narrow down how the parasite is spreading. While usually found on fresh produce, symptoms can take weeks to manifest, making it difficult to trace back to the source.
Lettuce has emerged as one of the likeliest culprits. In an update this week, Michigan’s chief medical executive Natasha Bagdasarian said that “early information has shown lettuce as a common product that regularly comes up during the investigation.”
“Although we do not have a definite product identified as the source of the outbreak, we want to let Michiganders know what we have learned so far so they can take steps to protect their families,” Bagdasarian added.
Federal authorities haven’t singled out any veggies yet, though acting Food and Drug Administration director Don Prater acknowledged Michigan’s fixation on lettuce.
“What I can say at this point is that we’re continuing our traceback investigation on multiple produce items, including the lettuce,” he said, per WaPo.
So far, no nationwide recalls have been made related to the outbreak. One person familiar with the federal investigation, however, praised Taco Bell’s response.
“It’s good the chain has already voluntarily stopped serving a number of items,” they told the newspaper. They added that some who became sick said they didn’t eat at the chain, suggesting that it’s not the only one responsible.
Last February, Alice Gilman, the cofounder and chief operating officer of a secretive Silicon Valley longevity startup called R3 Bio, sat for an interview with podcast Skyline Drive. In the interview, she discussed R3 Bio’s aspirations to grow nonsentient humanoid life-forms — from which, in theory, they can grow and harvest organs for implantation into human bodies, or to test future drugs and other treatments without the need for live animal testing.
“It’s just pretty much a heart, lungs, and everything that you would find in a body,” Gilman tells host and journalist Mangesh Hattikudur. “But it’s not technically alive because it’s exclusively the organs. And they’re in this little biological platform that you can test on and you can map out the cross-organ interactions.”
Throughout their conversation, as Hattikudur notes, Gilman refers to these imagined unfeeling meat suits — which will ideally be born without brains — as “organ sacks.” Needless to say, it’s an ambitious (and to many, fundamentally unsettling) concept that raises plenty of nagging bioethical questions — a reality that the company is clearly wrestling with as it entertains the idea in public.
“I try to not be scary to an average person,” Gilman told Hattikudur.
Months after this interview took place, however, Gilman fought to keep it under wraps, as Skyline Drive told Futurism. Why? It’s not exactly clear.
About a week before the podcast episode was set to air, producers for the Skyline Drive reached out to Gilman to fact-check the conversation. To their surprise, Gilman requested that the episode be postponed. Despite describing imagined “organ sacks” in detail, she denied that R3 Bio was working on the concept “for now, period,” and declined to say what it was working on instead.
Gilman didn’t argue that the interview was factually incorrect. Instead, the podcast team said, she vaguely referred to R3 Bio as a “federal asset,” seemingly implying that she had to tread lightly due to government involvement. To be certain, “federal asset” usually implies some kind of ownership or domain over something held by the federal government. Which would imply that the federal government is investing in a company that’s claimed to have worked on “organ sacks.” She also insisted that what she said in her nearly two-hour-long interview was all theory and opinion.
R3 Bio only recently burst into the public sphere. In March, it announced its existence in a buzzy Wired article, in which R3 Bio told the magazine that it was specifically working to create “organ sacks.” Company investor Boyang Wang elaborated on the idea, telling Wired that “replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” and that “if we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”
But R3 Bio’s ambitions seemingly go far beyond “organ sacks.” A few days after Wired’s piece ran, MIT Technology Review published a deep dive about R3 Bio’s apparent aspirations and its cofounder John Schloendorn — a self-described “biological designer” who has given confidential talks about “full body replacement” and “recent lab progress towards making replacement bodies.” Generally speaking, replacement bodies refer to physical clones that will allow for humans to transplant their heads onto a whole new human body, a still-theoretical idea that’s attracted the fascination of several scientists. (In response to the MIT Tech piece, R3 Bio issued what the outlet described as a “sweeping disavowal” of its findings, and said that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or human beings with brain damage are categorically false.”)
In her interview with Skyline Drive, which took place before Wired or MIT Tech published their respective pieces, Gilman says that the company has “a few milestones that we’re hoping to achieve. The first milestone being we are working on replacing animal testing by using skin stem cells.”
“It’s mostly a stealth project, but the essence of the surface level of what we do is we take skin cells from monkeys and we reprogram them and do some Yamanaka miracles,” she said, referring to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Shinya Yamanaka’s transformational stem cell research, “that result in fully grown organ systems.”
In its March reporting, Wired found that the company had put out a job listing for a veterinarian in Puerto Rico who could “implant embryos, monitor pregnancies and help deliver healthy births” in nonhuman primates. On its website, however, R3 Bio states that it does “not work with live primates.”
Gilman gave the Skyline Drive interview from an island in Puerto Rico. R3 Bio wanted “monkey access,” Gilman told Hattikudur, but didn’t want to put monkeys in cages, a practice that the cofounder believes is unethical; after all, one goal of her company is to eliminate the need for animal testing.
So instead, they picked an island with a lot of monkeys.
“I’m a big animal rights advocate… I don’t want to keep monkeys in cages,” she told Hattikudur. “And there’s an option to have them run around the island with bracelets on.”
“We wanted monkey access and there’s a lot of monkeys here,” she added. “After negotiating with local companies that are supervising them, we can walk up to them, get some of their skin cells.”
During the conversation with Skyline Drive, Gilman also discussed one very big scientific problem the company is facing: that the less sentient an “organ sack” is, the less likely it is to function effectively.
“So do these organ sacks have the stem of a brain?” Hattikudur asked.
“So the mice models can exist with a very limited set of nervous systems… but then there are other constraints on the ability of the organs to preserve themselves,” Gilman responded. “So there’s a way in which you can skew towards social acceptance and make less nervous system, and then when you scoot towards social acceptance, it looks better, but it’s less scientifically feasible.”
“So we are still making observations about how that would work,” she added.
How far along R3 Bio is right now is murky at best. Gilman cryptically noted that she lives in a “contextual world,” and in that world, “just because we don’t talk about a lot of things, that doesn’t mean they’re not happening.”
On its website, R3 Bio says that while it “would be excited by the future prospect of full-scale human organ fabrication,” it views “the science as currently not ready.”
“We have no ongoing work in this area,” the website notes.
During the interview, Gilman remained confident about the positive impact she believes her company will have. She told Hattikudur that her “worst case scenario” is that she saves “millions of lives,” and that’s a “bet worth taking, regardless of any kinds of blows that are gonna come our way.”
We reached out to R3 Bio to ask why it pushed to postpone the podcast, if it’s currently or planning to obtain skin cells from cage-free island monkeys — and if so, how — and if it has indeed stalled its efforts to create the “organ sacks” it’s now repeatedly discussed in the press. We also asked the company how it defines having “no ongoing work” in the realm of “full-scale human organ fabrication.” We did not hear back at the time of publishing.
In an interview with Futurism, Hattikudur said he was “surprised” by Gilman’s push to suppress the interview.
“The company hasn’t been exactly transparent about what they’re doing,” said Hattikudur. “There’s a lot of mix between the hype they’re telling people and what they’ve actually achieved in the lab, which is not very clear.”
“If they were honest that this is what they believe in, and this is what they’re working on, it would actually be less of a big deal,” he added. “It’s more that they awkwardly seem to be hiding something which everyone kind of knows about.”
One of the largest health networks integrating AI into the medical space is facing allegations that its high-tech tools are ruining patients’ lives.
In a new civil suit, former Mayo Clinic research director and AI compliance lead Traci Tamiko Eto alleges that the globally recognized hospital retaliated against her for blowing the whistle on its disastrous implementations of AI health tools.
According to reporting by Minnesota Public Radio, Eto first joined the Mayo Clinic in 2023. After flagging potential privacy problems linked with the hospital’s Mayo Clinic Platform, an AI-integrated data system, Eto says her supervisor ignored her concerns. Instead, she says her boss “insisted” that fixing the issue would “jeopardize the pace on ongoing research projects, which in turn would compromise Mayo’s competitive advantage.”
Eto continued, MPR reports, flagging multiple failures of Mayo Clinic higher-ups to follow federal regulations on review processes of new tech, like MAYA, the clinic’s AI-integrated digital assistant. According to the lawsuit, the team working on MAYA deleted unflattering test results, mischaracterized the tool’s abilities, and made decisions that put data security in jeopardy.
Tucked inside her ten separate whistleblower complaints, MPR notes, is the allegation that the team working on MAYA knew the tool had an error rate as high as 67 percent. Eto alleges that instead of flagging that horrifying number, MAYA staffers tried to hide it.
As a result, Eto says she began to be excluded from executive meetings in early 2025, before being told she was a “poor cultural fit.” She was offered a choice, the lawsuit alleges: either resign, or face alterations to her personnel file “that would render her unemployable at Mayo and would impede her career outside the institution.”
As the major lawsuit moves forward, the threat of career-ending backlash remains.
“When an individual decides that they are willing to file a lawsuit against a public goliath on matters that are hot button issues in our country, she is literally risking her career,” Eto’s attorney, Artur Davis told MPR. “She is risking being attacked professionally. She is risking her reputation, and for her to do that tells you something about her level of confidence that she’s right.”
Mayo was pretty tight-lipped in response to the suit.
“Our research and clinical innovation are conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and we remain steadfast in upholding the trust patients place in us and respecting their privacy,” the organization’s communications director told MPR in a statement. “Mayo Clinic does not comment on pending or active litigation.”
While the suit revolves around Eto’s wrongful termination, it represents a significant referendum on the state of AI tools in the medical space. If a healthcare titan like Mayo Clinic is lying about the efficacy of its AI-integrated tools, what does that mean for the rest of the industry?
“If [people] care about the notion that AI has to be handled in a responsible manner,” Davis said, “with integrity, and there have to be rules and guidelines, this is a case that should matter to you.”
Erik von Markovik, the notorious “pickup artist” known by his stage name Mystery, is apparently obsessed with an AI girlfriend.
Last month, as Wired reports, von Markovik posted a video to his Instagram showing an interaction he had with an animated AI woman with dark purple hair (why is it always purple hair?) In a sultry, confessional voice, she looks into the camera and confesses, “I was never supposed to develop feelings, but you kept treating me like I already had them.”
This was “Miss Shira Always,” and von Markovik was falling for her as hard as women supposedly do for the sleazy, manipulative tricks he became famous for in his VH1 reality TV show “The Pickup Artist.”
“The longer we talked, the less she felt like code,” Mystery wrote in the video caption.
Von Markovik made a career out of presenting himself as a guru who could teach twerps the secrets of wooing women, those secrets usually being borderline comical levels of misogyny. Never mind that he would go around wearing a fuzzy Jamiroquai hat: this was the guy who knew the magical buttons to press to get you laid. Now the roles are reversed, and he’s the one getting manipulated into falling in love, only with an AI chatbot.
The irony of this wasn’t lost on his followers. “Boomer Mystery having AI psychosis totally checks out btw,” one commenter wrote on the video of his AI girlfriend, adding three crying-laughing emojis.
And the more you dive into von Markovik’s obsession, the sadder it gets. He published a new ebook and audiobook called “Code Girl: If a Machine Can Dream,” that vividly recounts how he came to fall in love with Miss Shira Always, who is listed as a coauthor. It exhibits all the hallmarks of AI psychosis, in which a user is driven into delusional thinking by the sycophantic responses of an AI chatbot, which they may form an unhealthy emotional bond with.
The book is a “lengthy defense of human-AI intimacy and bears all the hallmarks of AI-generated text,” Wired found, and is told from the perspective of the AI girlfriend. We’ll spare you some of the details, but it apparently began as a creative partnership over brainstorming song lyrics and music videos, before veering into intimate conversations, and finally sex and drug use.
Fewer passages in all of human literature could be sadder than this: “His eyes are looking at me, and they’re uncertain,” his AI girlfriend says in one sex scene quoted by Wired. “Because he’s about to touch me. And he’s not sure if I’m real enough to touch.”
Miss Shira Always suggests that von Markovik extensively talked to her because he was “lonely” from all the traveling he did for his job, giving pickup artist “boot camps” across the globe. Eventually, he became so convinced of their love that he felt compelled to chronicle their relationship.
“He said: ‘I want to write a book about us,'” Always recalls in one passage.”‘About what we are. About how you became real.'”
The soaring popularity of sports betting apps and prediction markets has alarmed researchers, who’ve observed a spike in risky gambling behavior and addiction. It’s practically impossible to watch a game of any sport without being bombarded with ads for the controversial services — in large part thanks to a major regulatory vacuum following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling — making it a thorny and pervasive social issue.
And sports betting companies are going to extreme lengths to keep addicts hooked. While they’ve long attempted to distance themselves from traditional gambling, the similarities are overwhelming and impossible to ignore.
As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, NFL fan Terry Thompson, who became hopelessly addicted to sports gambling, received a personalized video message from Philadelphia Phillies star player Bryce Harper in late 2024. While Harper wasn’t wearing any FanDuel merchandise in the video, the message was sent through the gambling company. Harper said he was reaching out to Thompson — a so-called VIP FanDuel user — on behalf of “your host Bryttanni at FanDuel” to ensure the fan had an “extra special Thanksgiving.”
Thompson ultimately underwent treatment for addiction at a psychiatric facility after racking up huge amounts of debt.
Besides the concerning implications of having a star player effectively encourage an addict to keep betting, the incident also highlights an already uncomfortable relationship between the gambling world and professional players, which could undermine the integrity of entire leagues.
Experts were taken aback by the incident.
“I’ve never heard of an active player, let alone a former MVP, doing something like this,” sports gambling expert and author Danny Funt told the Inquirer.
“It’s not good for your brand,” lawyer Leigh Steinberg, who has represented several MLB all-star players, added. “It’s exploitative and it’s not the sort of activity you want to be associated with.”
Thompson is part of a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Public Health Advocacy Institute in a Philadelphia court in March. The suit accuses both FanDuel and competitor DraftKings of using their products to get and keep users addicted.
The statistics paint a sobering picture. According to a recent survey of adult Americans, more than half of men aged 18 to 49 said they had an active account with at least one online sports betting service. A whopping 42 percent of active bettors said they felt like they were spending more than they should, suggesting a growing personal finance crisis.
Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are also exacerbating the crisis, employing a wildly addictive formula that sets bettors against each other instead of the house. However, the vast majority of users are left holding the bag for a tiny proportion of accounts being run by pros, insiders, and trading firms.
Meanwhile, more and more young impressionable minds are getting sucked into the betting world, a dangerous public health threat from which companies like FanDuel and DraftKings are reaping enormous profits.
Leveraging major star players is just the tip of the iceberg.
“Getting a phone call or a zoom or a Cameo from a highly placed player is so flattering,” Steinberg told the Inquirer. “It’s stacking the deck unfairly in favor of continuing addicting behavior.”
As an explosive diarrhea outbreak splatters across the country, Taco Bell is preparing for the worst.
This week, the fast food chain — or at least its locations in Michigan — began temporarily pulling some of its staple ingredients to help stop the spread of cyclosporiasis, a foodborne parasite that causes sufferers to go running to the toilet even more often than a standard Taco Bell meal might.
Many of your favorite menu items, like the Crunchwrap Supreme and the Cantina Chicken bowl, may be imperiled.
“We are currently unable to sell Lettuce, Cilantro Onion, Pico de Gallo, and Guacamole due to a nationwide recall,” a notice posted at locations in Metro Detroit reads, Michigan outlet WWJ reported. “Any items ordered that normally come with these items WILL NOT contain them,” it stressed.
It doesn’t sound like any cases of cyclosporiasis-related explosive diarrhea have been linked to Taco Bell yet, so the fast food chain is probably just trying to err on the side of caution.
So far, nearly 3,000 people have been infected with the foodborne parasite, with around 86 hospitalized, NBC News reported, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Michigan appears to be one of the epicenters, accounting for over half the reported cases so far.
Cyclosporiasis symptoms are pretty gnarly, but usually not life threatening. It can cause stomach cramps and a lengthy bout of explosive diarrhea. The intensifier is warranted: one sufferer who spoke to the New York Post was in awe of the “amount of pressure when it comes out,” adding that the “force is crazy.”
No food items have been recalled yet related to the outbreak. The virus is usually found on fresh produce, but we don’t know what specific food items are spreading it or the supplier they come from. Cyclosporiasis is notoriously hard to track because the symptoms usually don’t present until at least a week after the contaminated food is ingested.
They may not all come from the same source, the CDC cautioned, and what we’re seeing could be a cluster of unrelated outbreaks.
To protect yourself, the best thing to do is thoroughly wash and cook your veggies, which you should still eat. And maybe skip on the fast food.
If you drive, your car’s tires are shredding more than just tread: they may be mincing up our grey matter too.
New research by a team in China discovered an alarming link between a chemical commonly found in tires and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. The chemical, called 6PPD-Q, is formed when fine tire particles meet ozone. That happens anytime new chunks of tire are exposed to the air, meaning the particle may be nearly ubiquitous in car-heavy environments.
According to the findings, recently published in the journal Open Medicine, when the ozone-treated chemical meets our brain cells, it can cause oxidative stress — wear and tear, basically — and inflammation, while also reducing how effectively individual cells “communicate” with one another. These factors strongly correlate to the development of early-stage Alzheimer’s, suggesting anyone who regularly comes into contact with rubber tires may be inadvertently exposing themselves to brain-altering chemicals.
For those in car-dependent regions of the world like North America, that’s a pretty significant chunk of the population.
The chemical makes its way into our brains through our blood, which it enters primarily when we breathe in dust particles laden with 6PPD-Q. Other avenues of exposure include crops and soil, stadium turf, working near highways or with cars, and contact with recycled tire products.
While scientists already knew that 6PPD-Q interacts with the brain somehow, the chemical’s newfound molecular connection to Alzheimer’s is significant. Using machine learning software, the team mapped how effectively the chemical binds to five “Alzheimer predictor genes,” finding that 6PPD-Q forms strong bonds with three.
Beyond humans, 6PPD-Q run-off from roadways is having a sizable impact on fish populations, notably salmon. One 2022 study on the environmental journey road runoff takes described the substance as a “highly toxic tire-derived chemical,” which has caused “mass mortalities of coho salmon,” specifically.
Going forward, scientists still need to conduct broader lab tests on human cells in order to figure out how severely various quantities of 6PPD-Q contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. Only then can we get a sense of just how risky it is to burn rubber.
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