This summer, every meal feels like a risk.
Just as the US is recovering from a major cyclospora outbreak stemming from tainted iceberg lettuce, salmonella has turned up in jalapeños, eggs, and even dog food. The jalapeño-related outbreak is now responsible for at least 431 illnesses and 57 hospitalizations in more than two dozen states. Meanwhile, a dual-pathogen outbreak of E. coli and salmonella linked to alfalfa sprouts has affected 55 people across 15 states.
But is it just your overactive imagination that these outbreaks are worse than normal?
To answer that, WIRED tallied up publicly available numbers from the Food and Drug Administration’s investigations of foodborne illnesses. The agency has identified more than 12,800 illnesses tied to foodborne outbreaks in 2026, already far surpassing the number it has identified in any year since 2020. For comparison, there were 895 cases related to foodborne outbreaks last year.
Experts say the summer of sickness is the result of chronic underfunding in food safety systems, gaps in federal food policy, and recent cuts to the country’s public health infrastructure by President Donald Trump’s administration.
“What is happening this summer just demonstrates to me the vulnerabilities in the system—and what happens when you stress the system,” says Barbara Kowalcyk, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition.
To understand how this summer became so swamped with foodborne illnesses, one needs to understand the scale of the cyclospora outbreak, which “was absolutely unprecedented,” says Jennifer McEntire, a food microbiologist and founder of the consulting firm Food Safety Strategy.
The FDA’s numbers, drawn from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s case count, establish this cyclospora outbreak as the largest the agency has investigated in the US since the 1990s. Yet even this figure undercounts how many people actually got sick, according to the CDC’s own calculations.
The FDA’s figures only count illnesses directly linked to a specific outbreak under investigation. So far, about 67 percent of the CDC’s 17,180 laboratory-confirmed cases in the US have been linked to Taylor Farms’ iceberg lettuce; the rest are linked to other outbreaks or one-off infections, which require a full-blown FDA investigation. On top of that, the CDC is aware of at least 11,844 additional cases that have either not been confirmed by a lab test or require further analysis for other reasons.
Previously, cyclospora infections were rare compared to other common foodborne bugs like salmonella and E. coli. The previously obscure pathogen typically causes a few hundred to a few thousand illnesses a year in the US. Because it is—or at least was—relatively uncommon, cyclospora isn’t included in standard panels that test for several types of gastrointestinal disease. That can mask the true size of an outbreak, on top of the many people who may have gotten diarrhea from the parasite but decided not to go to the doctor.
Cyclospora is also particularly tricky to get rid of, with its tendency to lodge itself into the crevices and folds of leafy greens, herbs, and berries. These foods are typically eaten raw, and food sanitizers aren’t effective at removing the parasite because it forms a tough, protective outer shell.
