If you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, you’ve probably heard of the new parasite infesting lettuce around the country.
It’s called cyclospora, and although the parasite typically spreads through human waste, it reached infamy this summer when people across the country experienced digestive issues — and, yes, explosive diarrhea — after consuming contaminated iceberg lettuce.
If you’re like me and eat out often enough to worry about this sort of thing, then you may have been alarmed by this news. Fortunately, Alabama is far from the epicenter of the outbreak. While Michigan and Ohio are reporting thousands of cases, the former reporting the only two fatalities so far, the Deep South has been mostly spared. However, Alabama residents should still keep this epidemic in mind for what it says about our ability to respond to disease nationwide.
Six years ago, America’s pandemic response was thoroughly tested by COVID-19. This test revealed severe shortcomings in our ability to respond quickly and effectively to viral outbreaks. Today, the outbreak of cyclosporiasis among Americans is revealing new — or, indeed, old — weaknesses, some of which appear to be self-inflicted.
Last year, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, directed by Elon Musk, controversially slashed the USAID budget into ribbons. Though innumerable programs were hurt by this, the laid-off employees included some of the CDC’s experts in tropical diseases like malaria and, as it would turn out, cyclospora.
As The Guardian reported earlier this summer that the CDC laboratory specializing in cyclospora has fallen from 11 people to three.
With less than a third of its previous staff, it’s easy to imagine that the CDC is less equipped to plan and prepare for situations like the outbreak this summer.
No American politician can be faulted for a parasite contaminating lettuce in Mexico. However, the condition of our health organizations and ability to respond to events such as these is squarely the responsibility of our government and the current administration.
As a former CDC official told The Washington Post, while the reduced personnel cannot be said to contribute to the number of cases, it will hamper the ability of the CDC to “track longer-term disease trends and risks.”
Other experts, some of whom directly worked with cyclospora, are a little more concerned. Joel Barratt, a previous team lead of the CDC’s cyclospora lab, told Wired that “outbreak responses — which require rapid, timely responses — are going to be greatly diminished.”
One can only hope that the reduced capability of the CDC to respond to cyclospora — or the myriad of other diseases the CDC’s labs study — does not result in further harm or fatalities beyond what has already occurred.
To those of us who lived through COVID-19, it should be startling that the current administration is so quick to cut programs that prepare us for outbreaks.
For the more critical eye, however, it’s already a story as old as the first Trump administration. In a stark parallel to this summer’s events, in 2019, President Trump directed cuts to USAID’s zoonotic coronavirus early warning program. Only a few months later, the first COVID-19 case was reported in the U.S.
It is impossible to know with absolute certainty if cuts to the CDC’s cyclospora lab or USAID’s warning programs directly caused a more destructive outbreak; however, it is undeniable that the current administration’s cuts to our preeminent health organizations may lead to more unpredictable epidemics in the future that are harder for the U.S. to respond to.
After all, as this summer has surely demonstrated, the worst possible time you can learn you’ve fired the people responsible for tracking and responding to a disease is after an outbreak has already occurred.
At the very least, Americans can rejoice that all known cyclospora-infected lettuce has been recalled and should be off their shelves by now. So, you’re free to get your Taco Bell and be stuck on the toilet the old-fashioned, healthy way.
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