There’s something new these days in food safety. Or, more accurately, something old.
We have returned to a time when we were challenged to know what was happening in food safety and public health since the tools were not available to us. There was no PCR. There was no Whole Genome Sequencing. We didn’t know about some of the pathogens that we now freely discuss – not because they didn’t exist, but because we simply didn’t know they did. I could go on and on, but the point is that we used to be challenged because we were limited in our action since we lacked tools for detection, research, and public health infrastructure.
Back then, we were missing information because the tools did not exist. Today, we lack information because we have chosen to dismantle or underfund the systems that use them.
Public health infrastructure isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’. It’s essential to protecting consumers, to support food producers, and build prevention-based systems. A cornerstone of prevention-based systems is proactive surveillance and monitoring.
Testing for pathogens does not create a pathogen, and stopping doesn’t make them disappear. Active surveillance allows us to identify them early, determining how the pathogen is moving in the community, target interventions and limit the spread if present. We all saw during the recent COVID pandemic how uncertainty about risk ripple through society. Fear grows and responses become larger, less targeted, and more disruptive. The resulting damage extends far beyond the immediate threat.
This is what we are seeing with the current Cyclospora outbreak.
The number of influencers, media, articles, industry calls and public concern about this outbreak is enormous. The attention is understandable. When it comes to whether consumers, and their families, are going to be impacted by this illness, there is high interest. People want to know whether they and their families are going to be safe. They care deeply about the safety of their environment, water, and food system because most Americans depend almost entirely on a distributed supply they cannot independently verify.
The harm is not limited to the thousands of Cyclospora illnesses reported as of July 2026. It includes the rapid erosion of trust in the water we drink, the food we buy, the restaurants where we eat, and the institutions expected to protect us. Few things create more anxiety than uncertainty about something as fundamental as food.
It doesn’t (and shouldn’t) have to be this way.
Information about foodborne pathogens, surveillance, and transmission pathways is not optional. Stopping monitoring does not eliminate risk. It makes risk harder to see, harder to manage, and more likely to generate fear and distrust.
For the food industry, the absence of specificity is especially damaging. When investigators cannot identify the source, pathway, or scope of an outbreak, entire commodities, regions, and sectors may be broadly implicated. Those generalizations can mislead consumers, damage responsible producers, and impose costs far beyond the products removed from shelves.
Another current headline offers a useful contrast: the New World screwworm threat to the U.S. beef supply. In response, USDA has committed substantial resources to surveillance, prevention, movement control, and research. The strategy is straightforward – determine where the threat is, understand how it is moving, and act before it spreads.
Cyclospora alone may not threaten the volume of the U.S. food supply in the same way, but it threatens consumers’ health and confidence in that supply. The loss of trust may ultimately be the broader and more persistent threat.
The time is now to be outraged but not just outraged.
The time is now to reinstate the surveillance systems that our US consumers and producers deserve. Overly broad implications of food items cost far more than the product removed from the shelves. It continues to lower the level of trust in the system for all within our food system and that has significant costs for all of us.
Cyclospora needs to be monitored, but not just for the food supply.
We need to understand when it appears, where it is circulating, how it moves through communities, and why predictable seasonal increases continue to occur. That means monitoring illnesses, waterways, wastewater treatment systems, and food and agricultural environments for earlier evidence of community circulation.
Wastewater surveillance could provide an earlier signal that Cyclospora is present in a population, allowing public health officials to target investigations more efficiently. Expanded monitoring would also increase access to Cyclospora oocysts, which remain a major limiting factor in research, method development, and source attribution.
It is time to treat Cyclospora as the recurring public health threat it is, and to rebuild the whole public health surveillance systems needed to see it, study it, characterize it, and manage it before uncertainty becomes the crisis.
