In short
The Short Stuff episode “Short Stuff: Cyclospora” explains the 2026 U.S. cyclosporiasis outbreak. Topic: Cyclospora (a protozoan parasite) causing severe watery diarrhea, dehydration, and weight loss; it’s linked to contaminated produce (often lettuce) and a supplier tied to Taco Bell’s news coverage.
Key claims
As of Aug 13, 28,056 illnesses and 2 deaths; likely undercounted due to limited testing and reporting. Cyclospora oocysts survive in water and hide in leafy vegetables; they spread via human sewage and can contaminate crops through irrigation. The outbreak is framed as driven by climate change, reduced food-safety funding (FoodNet/Food Emergency Response Network), and delayed CDC guidance.
Notable examples
historical outbreaks (1978 Papua New Guinea; 1995 Chicago; 1996 Florida raspberries from Guatemala) and Taylor Farms de Mexico identified as a source.
Guests
Josh, Chuck, and Jerry (Dave sitting out).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOUnderstanding the Cyclosporiasis Outbreak
1:37 to 2:22
Learn about the recent cyclosporiasis outbreak and its statistics.
“But we're going to explain what cyclospora is all about.”
What is Cyclospora?
2:26 to 3:50
Explore the nature and history of the cyclospora parasite.
“It suddenly sounded like you had tea in your hand.”
Life Cycle of Cyclospora
3:51 to 6:27
Delve into the life cycle of cyclospora and its infection process.
“Then there was one in Florida the next year, about 45 cases.”
Symptoms and Effects of Infection
6:28 to 7:05
Discover the symptoms and health effects of cyclospora infection.
“And because your body's trying to poop this stuff out, you have water, but like you have never had it before.”
Exploring Outbreak Causes
9:44 to 14:08
Investigate the factors contributing to the largest cyclospora outbreak.
“That's a lot, you know, depending on who you are, but that's a lot no matter what, because it's 10 % of whoever you are, you know?”
Understanding Cyclospora Contamination
14:08 to 15:59
Learn how cyclospora contaminates food crops through treated sewage and its implications.
“And for those who don't speak Spanish, Taylor Farms de Mexico means Taylor Farms of Mexico.”
Preventing Cyclosporiasis
15:59 to 17:07
Discover practical steps to avoid cyclosporiasis, including washing produce and cooking tips.
“But if you don't want to get cyclosporiasis, there are some steps you can take.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Josh Clark:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. I'm Martha Stewart from the Martha Stewart Podcast. When you want to make your best, it's got to be McCormick. From everyday meals to hosting dinner parties, turn to McCormick. Their convenient, versatile flavors elevate every dish. McCormick has been and is an essential in the kitchen. Now they have a new line of signature seasonings crafted by flavor experts. With everyday favorites like garlic and olive oil, globally inspired ones like chimichurri and more. McCormick's signature seasonings make it easier to add bold flavors that make each bite of your meal more delicious.
0:37Josh Clark:Try the chimichurri blend that elevates grilled meats. Explore the full array of blends and find your favorite at mccormick.com. Hey everybody, you already like YouTube, so how can YouTube get any better? Well, we're talking premium because premium is the supercharged way to experience YouTube. Ad-free, which means uninterrupted videos, of course. background play, which lets you keep listening with your screen locked, or offline downloads. You can download your videos to watch anywhere, even without Wi-Fi connection. I mean, as researchers ourselves, like, I'm researching all day long for the show, and I really love not having ads on YouTube Premium because it really speeds up the learning process.
1:13Josh Clark:Whether you're relaxing at home or on the go, it's built for you because your YouTube experience just got even better with Premium. So if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply.
1:30Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. So this is The Short Stuff. Let's go.
1:37Josh Clark:That's right. Today we're talking about the recent cyclosporiasis outbreak that everyone heard about, notably with like tainted lettuce usually is what you're hearing on the news and Taco Bell was in the news because it turns out that the supplier that they used seems to have been ground zero for this outbreak. But we're going to explain what cyclospora is all about. Yeah.
2:04Chuck Bryant:This outbreak, as of August 13th, which is the latest data we could find, it's August 20th now, so this is old. It's 28 ,056 people have been sickened with cyclospora. I'm going with cyclosporiasis. It sounded like you gave the British pronunciation.
2:25Josh Clark:Sporiasis, yes.
2:26Chuck Bryant:Yeah. It suddenly sounded like you had tea in your hand.
2:29Josh Clark:Yeah.
2:30Chuck Bryant:So 28 ,000-plus people have been sick, and two people have died. And just a month before, it was at 9 ,481 cases. And you're like, wow, that's a lot of people. And it is. This is actually the third biggest foodborne outbreak in U.S. history. from what anyone could tell, it's the biggest cyclospora outbreak in human history. And even with those eye-popping stats associated with it, that 28 ,000 case number is probably just a fraction of the actual number of cases of people who have gotten sickened with cyclosporiasis.
3:09Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I think there are only 38 states reporting. the you know as far as reporting goes it's like people who went to the hospital and a lot of people just like wrote it out I'm sure and then even at the hospital you have to have a special test to see if it's actually that and not all the hospitals probably did that test so they probably just treated people for dehydration and diarrhea so it's a much bigger number than that and let's talk about what this thing is because it is a not a plant it's not a fungus or an animal. It's not a bacteria or a virus. It is a protozoan, and it's a parasite, and the human is the host.
3:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and it's not brand new, but the reason we can pretty confidently say that in all of human history, this is the biggest outbreak of cyclosporiasis, is because the first case that anyone's ever documented was in like 1978 in Papua New Guinea, And it's even newer here in the United States. The first outbreak was in 1995, right?
4:13Josh Clark:Yeah, in Chicago, only 23 cases. Then there was one in Florida the next year, about 45 cases. Those were raspberries from Guatemala. And every summer, basically, there's a little something, but nothing like we saw this year. You know, this stuff can live, this protozoan can live in rivers. It lives in water, drinking water, rivers, lakes, swimming pools. and it likes to hide in like berries and leafy vegetables because there's lots of little crevices and nooks and crannies where it won't get washed out, even if you're like rinsing your stuff. Also on knives and utensils and also from unwashed hands.
4:52Josh Clark:Gross. Very gross.
4:53Chuck Bryant:Like just let's be clear, it passes through human sewage. That's its mode of transportation, right? That's right. Right. So that means that somebody had human poop on their knife or their hands, if that's where you got it. Yeah.
5:11Josh Clark:So we should talk about the life cycle because it begins when it enters your mouth. It is in what's earliest stage. It's an infectious oocyst. Did you know how that's pronounced?
5:26Chuck Bryant:That's the British way of pronouncing it. I'm going with oocyst.
5:30Josh Clark:It is oocyst. I actually looked that up. And it is an egg that basically protects it from the outside world until it gets into the human system where it latches onto your gut and starts a 14-stage life cycle, which takes two days to two weeks to incubate before it becomes an infection.
5:53Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and the reason it takes so long is because that oo-oo cyst, is that what you said?
5:58Josh Clark:Yeah, with emphasis on the first oo.
6:00Chuck Bryant:Oo.
6:01Josh Clark:Or oocyst, sorry.
6:03Chuck Bryant:Oocyst. Yeah. I like oocyst. It's very tough. It's like a tough container, like you said, that protects the actual infectious part. And it has to break down. And it's evolved to break down in the human gut, thanks to your digestive juices and your bile and the temperature of your body inside your gut. All those things come together and break that oocyst down. And now, all of a sudden, four sausage-shaped sporulates get dumped out into your gut and start going to work on essentially making it really hard for your gut to absorb water. And because your body's trying to poop this stuff out, you have water, but like you have never had it before.
6:48That's right.
6:50Josh Clark:And every time you do poop, you pass along up to 10 ,000 oocysts per cubic centimeter of feces. That's a lot. Owie-gooie feces, it says. Should we take a break?
7:03Chuck Bryant:Yeah.
7:04Josh Clark:All right. We'll be right back.
7:20Chuck Bryant:We can eradicate food deserts with this technology.
7:23Josh Clark:Hey, everybody, it's Chuck from Stuff You Should Know, and that was Jaleah Hemings. She and her husband created Nourish and Bloom Market, a fully autonomous grocery store. You can scan a QR code to enter, pick up what you need, and just walk out. Or, as Jaleah puts it,
7:37Chuck Bryant:tap, grab, and go 24-7. We started to get flooded with folks saying, hey, I need you in my city. It became their mission to develop a store that could open within three months, even without any infrastructure. And just when we were like, how are we going to accomplish this goal? We won the AT &T Small Business Contest Grant. That$50 ,000 got us over the finish line where we built the first AI-powered grocery shipping container in the country. For Jalea, it's about building a legacy to show the world that you can solve any problem when you work together. Having the support of AT &T, the city of Atlanta, is huge.
8:14Chuck Bryant:Look at how many people we've been able to help.
8:16Josh Clark:Connecting changes everything. AT &T.
8:22Hey, everybody.
8:24Chuck Bryant:YouTube Premium takes something you already love, YouTube, and makes it even better. The content, the creators, the feeling of finding exactly what you're into for every mood and moment of your day. Like, for example, let's say you want to learn to cook, but you don't have time to go take cooking classes across town. Well, you can find tons of instructional cooking videos, all without ads, on YouTube Premium.
8:46Josh Clark:That's right. Premium transforms that experience into a more supercharged, enhanced way to enjoy YouTube. A YouTube Premium subscription gives you access to exclusive YouTube features and benefits, including, but not limited to, ad-free. So we're talking about uninterrupted videos. Background play. So background play lets you keep listening with your screen locked. And offline downloads. You can download your videos to watch anywhere, even without Wi-Fi connection.
9:10Chuck Bryant:That's pretty awesome. And Smart Downloads automatically downloads videos by your favorite creators, so even if you forget to download it ahead of time, Premium has you covered. So if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply.
9:43Josh Clark:All right, so we're back. You said the main symptom is really, really bad diarrhea, which obviously was going to lead to bad dehydration, like dangerous dehydration, electrolyte imbalances, potential kidney damage risk, maybe hospitalization, as we've seen, up to 10 % body weight, weight loss. That's nuts. That's a lot, you know, depending on who you are, but that's a lot no matter what, because it's 10 % of whoever you are, you know?
10:13Chuck Bryant:Yeah, what's interesting is there's not the inflammation or fever that's usually associated with a stomach bug. It's just a lot of pooping and the risk of really bad dehydration and then all the stuff that comes with that, right? That's right. So once you poop that stuff out, it makes it back into the water supply. It gets back into your food stuff, as we'll talk about in a second. And then the cycle begins again. And that's probably what happened. The water supply was used on food crops, where really, if you step back and think about it for even a second, it shouldn't be. But let's talk about, Chuck, why this U.S.
10:53Chuck Bryant:outbreak in 2026 is the biggest one, the biggest cyclosporiasis outbreak in human history.
11:00Josh Clark:Yeah, well, one is climate change, you know, with rising temperatures across the globe. These, you know, I don't think we mentioned that this thing used to be found only in the tropics.
Read the full transcript
11:09Chuck Bryant:Right.
11:10Josh Clark:But now these pathogens can be found elsewhere because of rising temps. The second one, and, you know, we're not getting political, but this is just a stone cold fact. This presidential administration has cut funding for food safety programs, including two key ones that might have stopped this. The Food Emergency Response Network, they grant states funding to test for food pathogens like this. And FoodNet, which tracks outbreak-causing pathogens, and FoodNet specifically, literally because of a lack of funding, stopped tracking six of the eight pathogens that it used to always track. And cyclospora is one of those.
11:49Chuck Bryant:Yep.
11:50Josh Clark:So, you know, that's just the deal.
11:52Chuck Bryant:Plus, the federal agencies that are responsible for basically taking the lead in guiding health care providers and public health officials and all that stuff throughout the country just sat on their hands for months. As a matter of fact, it was about two full months before the CDC stepped forward with guidelines and essentially basically really started talking about this publicly. In the meantime, this outbreak was bad enough that somebody had to do something. So Michigan ended up stepping forward and filling the role that the CDC was just dropping the ball on. They ended up issuing guidelines and stuff that obviously weren't regulations or anything, but that other health care providers in other states were like, OK, good.
12:40Chuck Bryant:Now I know what to do, thanks to the state of Michigan, not the federal government, which it's supposed to do. And if you put all that together, you're like, wow, this happened really fast. And to me, it gives a picture of like the United States built a really impressive foodborne illness surveillance network that that was fragile, apparently, but that really worked. Because if you just pull that stuff away and then this is the stuff that happens, I think there's 20 foodborne outbreaks right now going on in the United States. Yeah, it's it's in a way it's really impressive how effective it was before.
13:20Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. And boy, hats off to you Michiganders for taking the lead on that. One of the other big reasons is big agriculture. When it's, you know, something like that has been consolidated so much and industry has, that means that, you know, Americans are getting their crops from just, you know, the same places, basically. So if something like this happens, like happened at Taylor Farms, this was Taylor Farms de Mexico, which was the agricultural site, even though it's a California-based company. All of a sudden, this stuff's going out all over the country. There's also a – Taylor Farms is also being identified as a source of the other outbreaks, a couple of them, the Salmonella outbreak, at least from jalapenos, I think.
14:08Chuck Bryant:Yeah.
14:08Josh Clark:Yeah.
14:09Chuck Bryant:And for those who don't speak Spanish, Taylor Farms de Mexico means Taylor Farms of Mexico. And it's not just Mexico or Guatemala where you're going to find tainted produce. Something I was kind of alluding to earlier is that the cyclospora finds its way to your food crops through human sewage. And that can actually happen in the United States because there are, let me find it. More than half, I think 27 states allow for treated sewage water to be used to irrigate food crops. I did not know that.
14:50Josh Clark:I didn't either. Nine states don't have any policy. Four have guidelines. And 14 states allow it for crops but not food crops.
14:59Chuck Bryant:Yeah.
15:00Josh Clark:And, you know, yeah, that's where it's coming from.
15:04Chuck Bryant:Yes. So they, and we did say treated sewage waste. Yeah, of course. Right. So it's not like they're just spraying like feces all over your lettuce. But essentially on a microscopic level, they often are because a lot of sewage treatment plants aren't set up to handle cyclospora. Because again, this is not your average bacteria or virus. This is its own thing. So the oocytes, cysts can make it through onto your lettuce or whatever. And then also, sometimes those bacteria and the viruses that the sewage treatment plant is set up to take care of make it through anyway. So this is what I was saying.
15:45Chuck Bryant:It seems pretty smart to just stop using treated sewage on food crops.
15:52Josh Clark:Yeah, and maybe fund the agencies that are responsible for keeping track of this stuff would be awesome.
15:58Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah. So if you feel at all like you should go to the hospital, if you have cyclosporiasis right now, or if you have really bad water, but for any reason, just go. Like, don't risk it, whatever. But if you don't want to get cyclosporiasis, there are some steps you can take. One of them is at the very least wash off all your stuff because that can help. But cyclosporiasis can still hide. Right, Chuck?
16:23Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, we talked in Act One about the little nooks and crannies and it's hard to get to sometimes. The only thing to like kill it is to cook it to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. But you're not cooking your lettuce for your taco.
16:36Chuck Bryant:No, that's great. That's like the mom in Better Off Dead who boiled the bacon.
16:43Josh Clark:Yeah, that was a really silly part of that movie, that whole mom scene.
16:47Chuck Bryant:Yeah.
16:48Josh Clark:Stuff that's, you know, like stuff that has a nice wrapper around it, like a banana or an avocado, you're doing okay. And, you know, do plenty of hand washing, obviously, as well.
16:56Chuck Bryant:For sure. And if you are on the verge or have already started an email telling us how you used to like us before we became political, just stop. Don't bother. Short Stuff's out.
17:10Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From the publisher
The US has an unusual number of outbreaks of food-borne illness going on in the summer of 2026, and the star of the show is cyclospora. How does this parasite make people sick, where does it come from? You may not want to know.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
