America’s “explosive diarrhea” trend keeps gaining momentum as suspected cases of Cyclospora parasite infection climb up toward 7,000 across the nation. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has acknowledged 1,644 confirmed domestic cases as of this Wednesday—with at least 5,100 more cases still allegedly requiring further analysis before they can be classified as domestic.
Thanks to the former leader of the CDC lab tasked with investigating outbreaks of Cyclospora, however, we now know what the holdup is. Billionaire Trump-enabler Elon Musk’s “government efficiency” squad DOGE downsized the lab from 11 members down to just three last year, as the former lead for the CDC’s domestic surveillance team covering parasitic diseases and malaria, Joel Barratt, told Nature this week.
“The outbreak won’t stop any time soon, until public-health agencies are able to pinpoint exactly where the parasite is entering our food system,” according to Barratt, who left the agency voluntarily ten months ago.
But, as you might imagine given this CDC’s domestic surveillance team’s full purview, downsizing this lab to just three people carries much higher risks than a mere summer of miserable bowel movements, which have currently caused no recorded fatalities.
“Cyclospora is just one piece,” Barratt told Wired this week. “It’s making the news right now, but there are other, more dangerous pathogens than Cyclospora.”
Hollowing out the center
The CDC has lost an estimated 3,000 employees, amounting to about 25% of the health agency’s total staff, since Musk’s DOGE initiative launched in early 2025. The figure includes layoffs as well as those who accepted early retirement or buyout packages.
Some, like the then-director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Demetre Daskalakis, resigned on principle and blasted the incoming Trump administration on the way out, often citing its arguably Orwellian approach to public health.
In his public resignation last August, for example, Daskalsis stated he was unable “to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.”
An epidemiological crapshoot
Given the predictable usual suspects behind Cyclospora outbreaks—leafy greens, salad bags, and raspberries among them—food suppliers are not waiting for the CDC’s strained three-person team to weigh in on the origins of the crisis.
Lettuce supplier Taylor Farms, for example, told federal officials that it plans to recall ingredients that have been linked to the outbreak via shredded iceberg lettuce sold to Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia, according to Bloomberg. Infectious disease experts believe the true scope of the outbreak is undoubtedly higher, however, meaning it’s still anyone’s guess what else might be hastening the disease’s spread right now.
And full answers to the outbreak’s origins may take a while. The DOGE cuts at CDC have created a culture of endless temporary fixes, according to insiders who spoke to the Federal News Network this June. The downsizing has led to an endless game of musical chairs wherein knowledgeable staffers temporarily hop on or “detail” to fill in sorely needed duties—leaving new gaps in their old roles.
“Basically, people are leaving their teams to detail, but every time it creates a new vacancy that needs to be filled, so it’s an endless circle,” one anonymous CDC employee told the site. “It’s whack-a-mole, except the moles are jobs that need to be done, and the hammer is an exhausted and understaffed CDC.”
