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.

More on the outbreak: Trump’s Explosive Diarrhea Scandal Is Getting Worse and Worse

The post Trump Is Having a Major Problem With Diarrhea appeared first on Futurism.

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.”

Nonetheless, in terms of public health messaging, the ongoing outbreak is clearly causing far more confusion than it should, highlighting massive budget cuts that allow outbreaks like the current one to flourish.

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.

More on the outbreak: Let’s Be Real, The Explosive Diarrhea Outbreak Is Trump’s Fault, Not Taco Bell’s

The post Taylor Farms Made Huge Donation to Trump Group After Loosening of Rules That Could Have Prevented Explosive Diarrhea Outbreak appeared first on Futurism.

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 romantic AI companions? We cast a mournful glance towards the bottle.

More on health habits: To Get Swole, Teens Are Pumping Themselves Full of Drugs Meant for Fattening Cows for the Slaughterhouse

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