Michigan has more than 1,250 Cyclospora cases this year. Ohio has 177. Illinois has 141. Add the rest and the state tallies are pushing well past 1,600 sick people. The CDC’s national count has finally moved to 843. No food has been named. And the agency wants you to believe those numbers can’t be reconciled — that this is just how outbreaks look, murky and slow and hard to pin down.
It isn’t. It’s a choice, and they made it quietly.
As of July 1, 2025, the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network — FoodNet, the thirty-year-old backbone of how this country measures foodborne illness — stopped requiring its ten sites to report six of the eight pathogens it was built to track. Campylobacter, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, Yersinia, and, yes, Cyclospora. Only Salmonella and STEC survived the cut. Pediatric hemolytic uremic syndrome reporting went optional too. The public didn’t learn any of this until NBC News reported it on August 26 — nearly two months after it took effect, and only because a reporter asked. There was no announcement. No press release. No notice to the families who would spend the next summer sick and uncounted.
FoodNet is the only federal system that goes and looks — that actively calls more than 700 clinical laboratories and asks what they’re seeing, instead of waiting for a case to be voluntarily reported up the chain. Everything the CDC is now pointing to as a replacement — NNDSS and the rest — is passive. It waits. FoodNet hunted. That distinction is the entire ballgame, and the agency knows it, because its own 2024 preliminary report already concedes that it can no longer calculate Campylobacter incidence or compare it to the baseline “because of the reporting changes.” Translation: we broke our own instrument, and now we can’t read it.
Watch what happens with Cyclospora this year, because it made the cut. Surveillance for that parasite has been optional for a full year, and the CDC has been unable — or unwilling — to name a vehicle. When the number the public sees is finally more than the 145 CDC reported for weeks and the number on the ground is 1,600-plus, that is not a data lag. That is the predictable result of telling your best-trained sites they no longer have to count.
The reason, stripped of the public-relations gloss about “prioritizing core activities,” is money. CDC’s own talking points to Connecticut put it plainly: funding “has not kept pace” with keeping all eight pathogens under surveillance. Frank Yiannas, the former FDA food safety chief, said it as clearly as anyone: without the broader data, we won’t know as accurately as possible whether we’re getting better or worse. That is exactly the point of Frank’s push for a National Foodborne Outbreak Investigation Board — an independent body that would actually chase these outbreaks to ground instead of quietly deciding not to look.
I will say what some want to obscure: when you stop counting sick people, they don’t stop getting sick. You just stop having to answer for them. A thousand uncounted cases in Michigan is not bad luck. It is a policy, and this year’s Cyclospora outbreak is what that policy looks like dressed up as bad luck.
If you want to make foodborne disease disappear, don’t investigate foodborne disease. That’s not a slippery-slope warning anymore. As of July 1, 2025, it’s the operating plan.
