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For as common as food poisoning is—according to the Food and Drug Administration, there are approximately 48 million cases in the U.S. each year—rarely do outbreaks go viral, both literally and culturally, like Cyclospora has over the past month. One reason this outbreak has proved the exception is likely due to the pathogen’s “explosive diarrhea” side effect, and the lowbrow comedic opportunities that naturally arise. But an even bigger reason is that we continue to know relatively little about its origin. Given the state of epidemiology and data analysis, food poisoning probably shouldn’t be a monthlong mystery, and yet here we are.

Surely the decimation of federal government agencies, among them the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA, factors into why this outbreak remains a mystery. The Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, a collaborative federal-state program led by the CDC, saw its funding drastically cut by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in July 2025, when FoodNet went from surveilling eight pathogens to two, with Cyclospora joining Campylobacter, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia on the ignored pile.

To use the terminology of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kennedy has been throwing away umbrellas in the middle of a storm left and right since he took the helm: Monitoring for measles, screwworm, flu, and Ebola all saw funding cuts. Who needs umbrellas when you’ve got a tanning bed, a chin-up bar, beef-tallow stockpiles, and a gallon of only-sometimes-poisonous raw milk? The CDC and FDA have lost at least 6,000 workers, many arbitrarily, many in crucial positions. Kyle Diamantas, a lawyer with no public health credentials and a hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr., now leads the FDA, while Jay Bhattacharya, who made a name for himself advocating for herd immunity during the COVID-19 pandemic, leads the CDC.

Poop jokes and memes aside, cyclosporiasis is a serious parasitic foodborne intestinal illness whose symptoms include nausea, fatigue, and explosive diarrhea that can last weeks or even months without antibiotic treatment. Tracing its source poses particular difficulties for two reasons: an incubation period of up to two weeks before symptoms first appear, and lack of a genetic fingerprint, unlike, say, E. coli. Monitoring like FoodNet had previously been doing, is helpful, but it’s........

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