What A Day - The Parasite Causing Explosive Diarrhea

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

By now, you've probably heard more than you ever wanted about cyclospora, a parasite that spreads via infected water and food and causes explosive diarrhea. This has been a very bad year for cyclosporiasis. According to the New York Times, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention typically report an average of 2,800 cases of the illness in the U.S. every year. But this year, the CDC reports more than 11,000 cases across 41 states. So, for more on our summer of cyclosporiasis and why you should maybe skip the bagged lettuce, we spoke to Julie Rovner. She's the Chief Washington correspondent and host of the "What the Health?" podcast at KFF Health News.And in headlines, Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels claim attacks on two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, Ukrainian drones are targeting Russia's largest online marketplace, and the FDA reviews seven peptide injections the agency banned three years ago over safety concerns.Show Notes: Check out What The Health? – kffhealthnews.org/podcast-series/what-the-health/ Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

Bagged lettuce comes from so many different places. And of course, this particular parasite cyclospora doesn't come off when you just wash the vegetables. That's part of the problem. You can get rid of some of it. But washing isn't really enough to kill it. You actually have to cook it to kill it. I'm Jane Koston. This is What Today, the show celebrating President Donald Trump's love of the one thing every American.

Every single one seems to hate. Tariffs. Here's CNN's Harry Anton. Every single poll since March 29, 2025, that is over a year ago. In fact, days in a row, it's 482 days in which every single poll that meets CNN standards for publication, Donald Trump has had a negative net approval rate. Well, what happened right around March 29, 2025? All polls just before Liberation Day 2025.

It was the tariffs. It was the massive implication of those tariffs, the implementation of it, that, of course, many of them got overturned. that turn the American people once and for all against Donald Trump in his second term as president. Now, one quibble. Later in this segment, Harry says that Trump is so underwater, he's like, quote, The Little Mermaid. He doesn't even come up for air anymore. But as I recall, a major plot point of The Little Mermaid is that she does,

in fact, spend a lot of time not in water. On today's show, we talk about the brand new intestinal parasite that's entered our villa, sorry, country, with KFF Health News's Julie Rovner. Before we get into, all that, here's what we're following today, Thursday, July 23rd. I think the Houthis, frankly, got snookered into this thing by the Iranians, and they were smart to stay out of it, and they should stay out of it, and they should stop. We'll see what happens there. Obviously, it's not a positive development. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, spoke to reporters today about the latest in the Middle East,

and the latest isn't looking so great. Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebel said they attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, potentially widening the Iran war as international oil topped $100 a barrel. The Houthis have threatened to shut down a key trade route that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. That would be a double whammy, considering the world economy is already reeling from Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz. As the U.S. continues to carry out strikes across Iran, Trump threatened, quote, major military punishment against the Houthis if their attacks on ships continue. Ukraine has targeted Russia's largest online marketplace, wild berries,

in an aerial campaign aiming to undermine Russia's wartime economy. Ukrainian drones first hit the company's warehouses over the weekend. Two more were attacked early Wednesday. At least nine people were killed in the attacks. The strikes on wildberries, which is Russia's equivalent of Amazon, are meant to make Russian citizens feel the consequences of the Kremlin's all-out invasion of Ukraine. While Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky did not name wildberries directly, he has said the facilities Ukraine hit were involved in supplying gear and various technical components to the Russian military.

A Kremlin spokesman disputed the claim and accused Kyiv of continuing to strike civilian targets. We're here today to continue the incredible progress we're making in communities nationwide to ensure that as new data centers go up, and they're going up all over. Electricity bills for American families will actually come down. you know, you're going to be building your own data centers and you're going to build building your own electric plants. You're essentially becoming a utility like Con Edison in New York, but maybe at a level that nobody's ever seen before

because we've seen some of the plants that they're building are absolutely incredible. What? President Trump expanded on a promise to Americans today at a rate payer protection pledge event. Trump had governors and electricity companies joined a voluntary pledge to shield U.S. consumers from higher utility bills from data centers.

He announced the pledge earlier this year, but that initial commitment has done little to comfort voters who worry about competing for electricity, water, and land with tech companies controlled by billionaires. I wonder why. It's unclear, with electricity demand already growing, whether consumers would see genuine savings.

Let's see if he can follow through on one of his favorite slogans. Promise is made, promises kept, seeing as he has yet to keep pretty much any promise anyone actually wanted. The FDA is holding an advisory committee hearing today and tomorrow on a subject near and dear to the hearts of Health and Human Services Secretary, RFK Jr., and every Instagram influencer you've never heard of. Peptides!

Specifically, the FDA is deciding whether or not to allow seven peptide injections the agency banned three years ago over safety concerns. Peptides are chains of amino acids that can perform a range of functions in the human body. Insulin is a peptide, and so are GLP-1s. But if you've spent any time on fitness Instagram or TikTok, you know that there are tons of other peptides. Users and influencers are claiming can help you build muscle, lose weight, or clear up your skin. Most of those peptides have undergone little to no testing in humans, and they can cause some pretty serious side effects. But back in October 2024, RFK Jr. promised to end the, quote, war on peptides. And clearly today is the first step of that fight.

a fight that is, unsurprisingly, pretty one-sided in favor of peptides, because how could you resist looking more like RFK Jr.? And that's the news. Let's talk about explosive diarrhea, which isn't my first choice for an interview topic, and yet, here we are. By now, you've probably heard more than you ever wanted to hear about cyclospora, a parasite that spreads via infected water and food and causes, you guessed it! explosive diarrhea. According to the Food and Drug Administration, there are now six clusters of psychosporiasis infections nationwide, including a new outbreak announced just Wednesday night that has already gotten at least 72 people sick, which is not comforting. This has been a very bad year for psychospiriasis. According to the New York Times, the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention typically report an average of 2,800 cases of the illness in the U.S. every year. But this year, the CDC says there have been more than 11,000 cases in 41 states. And one of those outbreaks has been linked to produce company, Taylor Farms. For more in our summer of cyclospiriasis and why you should maybe skip the bagged lettuce, I spoke to Julie Rovner. She's the chief Washington correspondent at KFF Health News and host of the What the Health podcast. Julie, welcome back to what a day. My pleasure.

Julie, are you eating bagged lettuce these days? I don't eat bagged lettuce as a rule, but I certainly wouldn't be eating it these days. And I feel a little bit smug because I went and did a whole bunch of pick your own a couple of weeks ago. So I know where my produce came from. So the reason I'm asking is because of the cyclospora outbreak that has been all over the news and apparently all over bagged lettuce. But it's been super confusing. So first, where does this parasite come from? It comes from human feces, either usually in irrigation water. Sorry about that.

I hate those words. I hate those words. Dislike. Yeah, it's gross. And it gets into food and it often gets into food that have lots of little sort of nooks and crannies and grow close to the ground. So think strawberries and lettuce and herbs and things like that. You mentioned that this can happen when human excrement finds its way into water supplies, which are then used to irrigate herbs, vegetables, fruits that are low to the ground. Now, looking at this outbreak specifically, there were reports that lettuce from the company, Taylor Farms, tested positive for the parasite. Then the FDA said it was a false positive, but actually they're still pretty confident that iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms is the culprit. So what do we know right now about this huge cyclospora outbreak?

That it's probably from multiple different sources. And of course, this quote, false positive test that we got back was after a different recall of Taylor Farms produce had already begun. That hasn't changed. So basically, iceberg lettuce from almost anywhere right now is suspect. Now, it feels like whenever we hear about a big, outbreak of foodborne illness. It's either weird gross meat or bagged lettuce in the summer. Why? Well, this particular parasite cyclospora does tend to flourish in the summer. And of course, we had a bagged spinach outbreak a few years ago, so it's not just bagged lettuce. Some of it is that it's coming from lots of different places, and it's very hard to figure out where. If there's

contaminated lettuce that's coming from a farmer's market, that's going to be isolated to the people who eat that lettuce from probably that farm. Bagged lettuce comes from so many different places. And of course, this particular parasite cyclospora doesn't come off when you just wash the vegetables. That's part of the problem. You could get rid of some of it, but washing isn't really enough to kill it. You actually have to cook it to kill it. Which one doesn't do. with lettuce. I am told that there are suddenly lots of recipes about cooking lettuce. Delicious.

We love boiled lettuce. I love boiled cabbage. But it is definitely a summer thing. But this year it's a much bigger summer thing that has been in previous summers. And as I'm sure we'll get to, it's not helped by the cuts that we've seen at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If you also do not want to boil your lettuce, stick around. We'll get back to my conversation with Julie Rovner in a moment.

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promo code day 10. Let's get back to my conversation with Julie Rovner. So cyclospora is not new. The USC's cases of the parasite every year, though definitely not on the scale. But you just alluded to we're maybe a year and a half out from doge cuts that eliminated thousands of jobs at the FDA and CDC. And correlation is not causation, but I have to wonder, do those cuts have anything to do with the size and scale of this outbreak? Probably not the size and scale of the outbreak, but probably the fact that we don't really know where the outbreak came from. The people who trace this back, the people who do the testing at the CDC and the FDA, there are fewer of those people than there were. And some of it was the doge cuts. Some of it was the early retirements that

were offered. Some of it were people who just left because they got frustrated feeling that they couldn't do their jobs anymore. But the fact is an enormous amount of expertise on things like cyclosporo walked out the door of these federal agencies, which makes everything harder to deal with. I mean, these were things that I think the Doge folks didn't really think about when they said, well, why are there all these people at all these science agencies? And why is there somebody who specializes in this one tiny, you know, little parasite that, by the way, is now sickening thousands of people across the country. These were just things they didn't look at when they were making decisions about what to cut. Knowing that the U.S. public health apparatus is operating with fewer people

and less resources than usual, how would you rate the reliability of the FDA and CDC to keep Americans healthy right now when it comes to food safety? Well, I think it's clearly not as reliable as it has been in the past. I have found myself sort of admiring the karma of the fact that the Department of Health and Human Services is now being run by all of the people who complained during COVID about how bad public health communication was. And now they're discovering that public health communication is hard. Yeah. So let's talk about Taylor Farms because Taylor Farms has been identified as a source of past foodborne illnesses, a cyclospore outbreak in 2013. was linked to some of their salad mixes at Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

In 2024, their onions were found to be the source of an E. coli outbreak from McDonald's quarter-pounders. Obviously, there's this. What do we know about Taylor Farms? Is this something specific to them? I think this is more about big ag than about Taylor Farms. As I said, you know, it's one of these aggregators that gets its produce from so many different people. And it frankly enables us to go to Olive Garden anywhere. in the country or go to McDonald's anywhere in the country and, you know, get the same quality

produce. But the problem is when there's something wrong with the quality of that produce, then we get regional or nationwide outbreaks of problems. So this would probably not be happening if McDonald's or these big chains were sourcing from more localized farms. Like this is a, this is the nationalization of our food supply showing up to bite us. It is. It is. And the internationalization of our food supply. I mean, there is still suspicion that this current outbreak of cyclospora is probably coming from Mexico. We don't know that for sure yet, because as we talked about, the CDC and the FDA is having trouble tracing it back. But we have certainly seen problems in imported produce in the past. There's another aspect of this that's popped

up recently, which raises a lot of questions. There has been some journalists, alleged, that Taylor Farms has donated a lot of money to President Trump. Could this have anything to do with the FDA's retraction or the so-called apology Taylor Farms says it received from the FDA? Well, of course, the FDA says that they did not apologize to Taylor Farms. There is some question about whether what turned out to be the false positive result was delayed while they discussed things with Taylor Farms. I should point out that false positives, particularly for cyclospora, not that rare because it's actually really really, difficult to find in, you know, some of these microscopic tests. It's not as easy as things like E. coli. But I want to ask, like, this is tied to not just the FDA and the CDC, but also to this

massive company that has made contributions to the president. How much weight would that have on how Taylor Farms is treated by the Trump administration and, therefore, on how this outbreak ends. Well, we don't know for sure, but certainly it's legitimate to be asking questions. And I know a lot of reporters are. And I'm also interested in the answers to whether they got some kind of preferential treatment because of their closeness and their ability to reach out directly the White House. But we don't know that for sure yet. Julie, as always, thank you so much for joining me. Always a pleasure, Jane. That was my conversation with Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent and host of the What the Health podcast at KFF Health News.

Before we go, Stacey Abrams is on a mission to understand what's broken in our political system, figure out what's really happening, and help us all feel a little more empowered to make change in our communities. On the latest episode of Assembly Required, she's talking with historian Heather Cox Richardson and award-winning Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagel to discuss how the way we frame our past can shape our civil discourse and progress today. Check out Assembly Required every Tuesday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a review,

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