\n<\/p>\n
State health officials in Michigan and Ohio are reporting thousands of cases of cyclosporiasis, a \u2013 a parasitic infection that causes \u201cwatery diarrhea\u201d, loss of appetite and weight loss.<\/p>\n
The outbreak of more than 2,800 cases comes a year after the Trump administration cut funding to state and local health departments and reduced the remit of a program dedicated to coordinating information on food borne illness, including of cyclospora.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like putting a puzzle together,\u201d said Barbara Kowalcyk, an associate professor at the George Washington University Milken Institute of Public Health, and director of the university\u2019s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security. \u201cYou start taking pieces out of your puzzle \u2013 it\u2019s harder to see the whole picture, and that\u2019s what we\u2019ve done. We\u2019ve taken pieces out of the whole puzzle.\u201d<\/p>\n
In contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported<\/a> 843 confirmed cases and 1,500 suspected cases of cyclospora across 31 states on Friday. Eighty-six people have been hospitalized, none have died. . The CDC expects the federal case count to rise, in part, because of delays typical in disease investigation.<\/p>\n Michigan appears to be especially hard-hit, with health officials reporting 2,640 cases<\/a>. Over the border, state officials in Ohio are reporting 177 cases<\/a>. The health departments did not identify a source of the outbreak.<\/p>\n The Michigan health department is urging restaurants and commercial kitchens in the south-east to thoroughly wash leafy greens, snow peas, some herbs and raspberries or, ideally, to cook them.<\/p>\n Cyclospora has a two-week incubation period, and the CDC assumes a six-week reporting lag between illness onset and receiving a case report. Investigating a disease with a long incubation period is tricky \u2013 to find potential links between cases, such as eating at the same restaurant or shopping the same store, epidemiologists interview everyone with a lab-confirmed case. Those interviews often take place two to four weeks after infection, making it difficult for people to recall what they ate.<\/p>\n Even with those challenges, Michigan\u2019s chief medical executive Dr Natasha Bagdasarian told the Associated Press<\/a>: \u201cthere is clearly a linked outbreak happening right now.\u201d<\/p>\n However, in an era of funding cuts, Kowalcyk said typical delays have likely been exacerbated.<\/p>\n \u201cHave the funding cuts to public health impacted the current activities related to the cyclospora outbreak? I think they have,\u201d said Kowalcyk. \u201cIf you\u2019re understaffed you might be interviewing [patients] after 6-8 weeks,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In part, delays have been exacerbated by the Trump administration\u2019s funding cuts, Kowalcyk said, citing both grant cuts to state and local health departments and changes to federal surveillance systems that make it harder to get \u201cthe whole picture\u201d.<\/p>\n The Trump administration cut in March 2025 $11.4bn in grants<\/a> to state and local health departments. Although those grants were earmarked for pandemic activities, Kowalcyk said they also built out local health department capacity. Michigan public health labs<\/a> alone lost $5.5m, according to Bridge Michigan, a local news outlet.<\/p>\n \u201cIn state and local health departments, you might have people who are funded by three to four different funding sources,\u201d said Kowalcyk. \u201cIf you take one away, you have to have people go part-time or you have to reduce your staff. There\u2019s not a lot of choice, which means your capacity to scale up during an outbreak is limited.\u201d<\/p>\n In July 2025, the Trump administration also reduced the scope of a program called FoodNet, which actively monitored for food-borne outbreaks. FoodNet\u2019s remit was winnowed from eight foodborne pathogens, including cyclospora, to shiga toxin-producing E coli and salmonella alone.<\/p>\n FoodNet helped coordinate information across states, and developed the oft-cited statistic that 48 million people living in the US are sickened with food-borne every year, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die.<\/p>\n \u201cDespite what the current HHS administration believes, ignoring a problem doesn\u2019t make it go away,\u201d public health and veterinary consultant Gail Hansen told the University of Minnesota\u2019s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy<\/a> (Cidrap) in August 2025. \u201cStates do not have the ability to coordinate information and data across states, and this cut will bring us back to a time before FoodNet.\u201d<\/p>\n The administration has broadly defended the change in FoodNet\u2019s scope as reducing duplicative efforts, and said foodborne pathogen investigations are not impacted by the change.<\/p>\n \u201cNarrowing FoodNet\u2019s reporting requirements is, in part, because the surveillance landscape has changed since the collaboration began in 1995,\u201d said a CDC website<\/a> updated in April. \u201cToday, other surveillance systems monitor for infection with FoodNet pathogens.\u201d<\/p>\n A reported for the Guardian reached out to HHS for a comment, but did not immediately receive a response.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" State health officials in Michigan and Ohio are reporting thousands of cases of cyclosporiasis, a \u2013 a parasitic infection that causes \u201cwatery diarrhea\u201d, loss of appetite and weight loss. The outbreak of more than 2,800 cases comes a year after the Trump administration cut funding to state and local health departments and reduced the remit 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NEWS<\/a>","rttpg_excerpt":"State health officials in Michigan and Ohio are reporting thousands of cases of cyclosporiasis, a \u2013 a parasitic infection that causes \u201cwatery diarrhea\u201d, loss of appetite and weight loss. The outbreak of more than 2,800 cases comes a year after the Trump administration cut funding to state and local health departments and reduced the remit…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35924"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35926,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35924\/revisions\/35926"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}