We Didn’t Just Cut a Program. We Cut One of Our Best Early Warning Systems for Foodborne Outbreaks.

Why cuts to Food be Net made combatting Cyclospora much more difficult

Every summer, it seems like we hear about another foodborne outbreak.

This year, it’s Cyclospora, a microscopic parasite that has sickened people across multiple states with prolonged, sometimes debilitating diarrhea. The investigation continues, but one question keeps coming up:

Why does it seem so hard to figure out where these outbreaks come from?

The answer is complicated. Tracing contaminated food through today’s supply chains is incredibly difficult. Produce can pass through multiple farms, processing facilities, distributors, and restaurants before it reaches your plate.

However, there’s another part of the story that deserves attention:

We’ve weakened one of the country’s most important foodborne disease surveillance systems.

What Was FoodNet?

FoodNet—the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network—was created in the 1990s after major food safety crises highlighted how little we knew about the true burden of foodborne illness.

Unlike passive reporting systems that wait for cases to trickle in, FoodNet actively worked with hospitals, laboratories, physicians, and public health departments across several states to identify infections caused by pathogens like:

• Salmonella

• E. coli

• Campylobacter

• Listeria

• Shigella

• Cryptosporidium

• Cyclospora

Because FoodNet actively looked for cases, it provided a much clearer picture of what was actually happening.

It helped answer questions like:

• Are infections increasing?

• Are prevention efforts working?

• Is this year’s outbreak larger than expected?

• Which foods appear to be causing illness?

Those data didn’t just produce scientific papers. They guided policy.

Why Surveillance Matters

People often think public health begins when an outbreak is announced. In reality, it begins months, or even years, before that.

Surveillance is what allows epidemiologists to notice that something unusual is happening.

One extra case doesn’t raise alarms, but twenty extra cases scattered across multiple states might.

Without strong surveillance systems, those connections become much harder to make. It’s like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle after someone has thrown away half the pieces.

Cyclospora Is a Perfect Example

Cyclospora has always been a challenging organism to investigate.

Symptoms may not appear for up to two weeks after exposure. People often can’t remember exactly what they ate (I know I can’t remember what I had for lunch a week ago!). Fresh produce has a short shelf life, and ingredients from many different farms are frequently mixed together before reaching restaurants or grocery stores.

Finding the source already requires detective work. Anything that reduces our ability to rapidly detect cases, compare trends, and recognize clusters makes those investigations even more difficult.

Prevention Doesn’t Make Headlines

The irony is that successful surveillance is almost invisible:

• When outbreaks are detected early…

• When contaminated food is removed quickly…

• When illnesses are prevented…

Most people never realize the system worked.

Public health is often judged by the disasters everyone sees, not by the disasters that never happened because someone caught the warning signs early.

Investing Before the Crisis

Food safety isn’t just about inspections, It’s about: laboratories, data systems, epidemiologists, state health departments and partnerships between clinicians and public health agencies.

These aren’t glamorous investments, but they’re among the highest-value ones we can make because they help prevent illness before it spreads. When surveillance capacity is reduced, we often don’t notice immediately. We notice months later, when investigations take longer, uncertainty lasts longer, and outbreaks become harder to understand.

Why This Matters to All of Us

Whether this Cyclospora outbreak ultimately traces back to one farm, multiple suppliers, or another source entirely, one lesson remains consistent:

Strong public health infrastructure is one of the best investments we can make in protecting our food supply. By the time you’re hearing about an outbreak on the news, thousands of hours of laboratory work, interviews, data analysis, and epidemiology have usually already taken place.

The better those systems function, the faster we can identify problems, and the faster we can protect the public.

Learning to Think Like a Doctor

One reason I wrote Think Like a Doctor is because stories like this rarely have simple explanations. It’s tempting to search for a single villain or a single answer.

Real medicine doesn’t work that way.

Doctors learn to ask:

• What evidence do we have?

• What evidence are we missing?

• What systems help us find answers?

• And what happens when those systems become weaker?

Those are the same questions epidemiologists ask during outbreaks.

If you’ve been following my coverage of Cyclospora, wildfire smoke, vaccines, or the many health headlines competing for your attention, I think you’ll enjoy the book. It isn’t about memorizing medical facts, it’s about learning the framework physicians use to separate evidence from speculation and make better decisions in a world full of uncertainty.

If that sounds interesting, you can preorder Think Like a Doctor today, and you’ll also be supporting the work I do here on Substack to explain the science behind the headlines.

Thanks for reading, and thank you for caring not just about today’s outbreak, but about the systems that help prevent tomorrow’s.

PREORDER THINK LIKE A DOCTOR HERE