20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 10-16, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com GUT CHECK As a record-breaking cyclospora season comes to a close, a look at the impacts on local growers and gaps in the food safety system. By Katie Rodriguez Just like there is a season for certain crops, there is a season for certain parasites. Roughly two-and-a-half months after the start of cyclospora season, which typically begins May 1, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. famously said in a July press briefing, “We have the outbreak under control.” His department oversees the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, two federal agencies responsible for working with state public agencies on detecting the outbreak and investigating potential food sources linked to the parasite. Since May 1, nearly 19,600 people have been sickened by the food-borne illness across 49 states, with 1,043 hospitalizations and two deaths recorded. This year’s cyclospora outbreak is the worst of its kind on record, according to an analysis by the consumer watchdog group U.S. PIRG Education Fund, and the third-largest foodborne illness outbreak behind two salmonella outbreaks, one in 1994 and the other in 1985. “There are certainly less human resources and capabilities because of the changes to both the CDC and FDA,” says Trevor Suslow, a UC Davis professor who serves as a technical adviser to the Center for Produce Safety. “They’ve lost quite a number of their experienced senior people in the divisions that dealt with this before, and they’ve also changed the requirements for reporting within their sentinel systems.” In 2025, the FDA lost 21 percent of its staff. The CDC lost 15 percent of its staff. The layoffs were part of HHS’ “transformation to Make America Healthy Again” in accordance with President Donald Trump’s executive order, “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” In April of this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it would decommission its Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, impacting ongoing experiments that generate data on how these pathogens behave
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