The Food and Drug Administration announced on Wednesday that it's investigating yet another outbreak of Cyclospora, the unicellular foodborne parasite behind a nationwide surge in explosive watery diarrhea illnesses. The FDA said 72 cases have been identified in this outbreak, but the agency provided no details on the situation.
This announcement marks the sixth Cyclospora outbreak investigation the FDA has opened this year. Overall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has gotten reports of more than 11,500 cases (including 4,173 confirmed and over 7,400 probable) from 41 states. Among the cases, there have been 308 hospitalizations and no deaths.
This year's tally so far—just in July—greatly exceeds the normal number of cases the US sees in a whole year. In recent years, the US has reported between 2,000 and 5,000 cases in a year, according to CDC data. With a new outbreak announced, the tally of cases is likely to continue climbing. Nevertheless, when asked about the national surge in cases earlier this week, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the situation was "under control."
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.
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.
Login
