As a fast-moving Cyclospora outbreak — on track to become the largest in U.S. history — surges past 3,300 cases in Michigan, with scores of additional cases spiking across the country, the International Fresh Produce Association is warning that public health officials are hurrying to assign blame rather than finding the actual source of the contamination.
In a recent statement, IFPA’s Chief Science Officer Max Teplitski leveled sharp criticism against current response efforts, arguing that the rush to point fingers at agricultural products without physical evidence will do nothing to stop people from getting sick. While Michigan public health investigators issued a statement saying they “do not have a definite product identified as the source of the outbreak,” they’ve zeroed in on lettuce and salad greens based on surveys of what sickened people have eaten in the last week.
Teplitski warns that relying strictly on patient questionnaires — which currently only account for half of the active cases — is leaving the door open to ongoing contamination. But when an outbreak of this scale accelerates, public health officials argue they have a moral obligation to warn consumers quickly, even if the data is purely epidemiological.
Teplitski says there’s a middle ground to be found.
“They absolutely have a moral obligation to identify the source and protect public health,” he says. “Let’s remember that before the Fourth of July, officials were leaking cilantro as the culprit. Consumers stopped eating cilantro, but the outbreak continued. When they implicate the wrong product, consumers continue to engage in risky practices that may put them in further risk, like drinking contaminated water or playing in contaminated recreational water.
“We don’t think this has to be a binary choice between warning the public or staying silent until a sample-backed source is confirmed,” he continues. “There’s a middle path: bring industry in earlier as a working partner, not just a subject of the investigation. That means sharing interview data, timing and geographic patterns as they’re collected, so supply chain and distribution experts can cross-reference them in real time against actual sourcing and production data for the region and season.”
Teplitski says this kind of collaboration can narrow a broad signal to something closer to a testable lead or rule one out faster than epidemiology or traceback can do alone.
“That’s the realistic balance,” he says. “It doesn’t ask regulators to wait longer to protect the public, and it doesn’t ask them to name a product or sector on a signal that … is still a long way from a smoking gun.
“When public health officials are rushing to appease instead of working collaboratively with the industry to solve the outbreak — we are going to call them out and hold them accountable every time,” he adds.
The State of Water
The tension is particularly high in Michigan, where Teplitski says the state’s Department of Health and Human Services is “defying reputable science” by publicly dismissing recreational waters as a potential source of the parasite. According to IFPA, because Cyclospora is notoriously difficult to detect and lacks the advanced genomic tracking tools used for bacterial pathogens, public health agencies must cooperate with the industry on robust, science-based testing rather than relying on potentially hazy memories of sick patients on the foods they’ve consumed in the last week or more.
“It is puzzling that the state public health officials still rebuilding trust with consumers after Flint, would rush to dismiss water as the source of this outbreak,” says Teplitski. “In my statement, we included several peer reviewed studies that identify water — drinking and recreational — as a known risk factor. In fact, the first documented U.S. Cyclospora outbreak, in 1990, was traced to contaminated water. A 2023 USDA/FDA advisory report specifically lists recreational water among the water types where Cyclospora has been detected, including chlorinated water.”
Teplitski also points out that Cyclospora has a complex life cycle, detection methods are inconsistent, and genomic tools are not as mature as those for bacteria. Given that genomic sequencing and testing tools for Cyclospora are notoriously inconsistent compared to those we use for E. coli or Salmonella, what does a scientifically defensible smoking gun actually look like for this parasite?
“In [an] outbreak of this magnitude, which is still ongoing, there has to be a sample of contaminated food or water. If Michigan health officials are outright refusing to test water, they will never have a positive sample,” he says. “Further, there’s a difference between evidence that narrows a hypothesis and evidence that proves it.
“Given the limitations of genomic tools for this parasite, we don’t think a ‘smoking gun’ here looks like the definitive whole-genome match investigators would expect for Salmonella or E. coli,” he continues. “Realistically, it looks like convergence: epidemiological signal, a physical sample with detected contamination, and a documented environmental or water pathway that explains how the organism plausibly got there, all pointing the same direction.”
While Teplitski says any one of those alone is fragile, it’s that gap that is exactly the industry’s exposure right now.
“When physical contamination is this hard to catch in real time, the industry can end up being blamed by default simply because it’s the visible, named category in a patient survey, not because the mechanism has actually been established,” he says. “We think the honest answer is that industry can’t fully protect itself from that risk alone. It requires the kind of collaborative, real-time data sharing we described earlier — epidemiology and supply chain and environmental data converging together, rather than a product name emerging from surveys alone and industry left responding after the fact.”
FSMA 204 Delays Impede Traceability
Teplitski says IFPA has long being a champion of end-to-end traceability in the fresh produce industry, and the association and its members are on the record against continued delays with the implementation of the Traceability Rule.
He further notes that “IFPA has offered technological solutions that will bring the entire supply chain into traceability compliance,” extending an offer to federal and state agencies for earnest bi-directional sharing of information to help bring this outbreak to a “meaningful closure.”
While an earlier compliance date for the FDA’s Food Traceability Final Rule of the Food Safety Modernization Act, or FSMA 204, was set for Jan. 20, 2026, the administration delayed the compliance date by 30 months to July 20, 2028.
The Packer asked Teplitski how full implementation across the supply chain of FSMA 204 would have altered the course of this specific outbreak.
“For example, we would be able to definitely and quickly answer the question: was cilantro used in this salsa delivered to this facility during a specific time period, and where else was it delivered? Then combined with epidemiological data from other locations where the product was distributed, would’ve helped to eliminate cilantro as a suspect within hours, instead of blaming the product, driving down consumption, causing millions of dollars of reputational and economical damage and then pretending like it didn’t happen.”
Retailer Resource
Teplitski encourages retailers who may be fielding customers’ questions about the food safety of bagged salad and other produce items, to direct shoppers to IFPA’s FAQ page, which he says is updated as soon as new information comes in.
