CDC declares record cyclospora outbreak tied to Taylor Farms lettuce officially over

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak ever recorded in the United States has ended, closing out a summer in which the parasitic illness spread through shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants and, separately, sold in retail bags at Walmart. In its final outbreak update, the agency tied 12,883 confirmed infections across 21 states to lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico, along with at least 570 hospitalizations and two deaths, both in Michigan.

The CDC's statement was blunt about why the outbreak is over: "The contaminated lettuce linked to this outbreak is no longer available in stores or restaurants," the agency said, noting that new infections had slowed to fewer than two a day by August after peaking at more than 1,000 in a single day in mid-July.

A record season, and a narrower outbreak inside it

The 12,883 cases tied specifically to the Taylor Farms lettuce sit inside a larger, and separate, number: the CDC's broader national surveillance count for cyclosporiasis this year has reached 19,595 cases across 49 states and the District of Columbia, the worst season for the parasite on record. The agency says it is still investigating five additional cyclospora clusters nationwide, though only the lettuce traced to Taylor Farms has been publicly confirmed as a source. A full course of treatment for a diagnosed patient runs $11,000 to $14,000, according to figures cited by CDC and outside researchers, underscoring the financial toll even for a parasite that is rarely fatal in healthy adults.

Cyclospora cayetanensis is typically contracted from contaminated fresh produce and causes watery diarrhea, cramping, bloating, nausea and fatigue, usually within a week of exposure; it is treated with a week to ten days of the antibiotic trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. The parasite is also notoriously hard to catch on routine lab work — the CDC's original July 14 Health Alert Network notice specifically warned clinicians that standard stool exams often miss it, and asked them to request modified acid-fast staining or PCR testing instead. That same notice recorded the demographic sweep of the early case count: patients ranged in age from 2 to 95, with a median age of 44, and 56 percent were female.

Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who was not involved in the response, said cyclosporiasis causes its most serious harm through dehydration from prolonged diarrhea and vomiting. Healthy adults typically recover on their own even without treatment, he said, but the illness can become dangerous quickly in people who are older, very young or already managing another chronic condition — precisely the population that made up Michigan's two deaths.

How the outbreak unfolded

Illness onset in the outbreak dates to roughly early May, but the case count did not draw attention until mid-July: the July 14 HAN alert counted 1,645 confirmed and 5,100 pending cases across 34 states, compared with just 249 cases at the same point in 2025. Investigators identified Taco Bell as the common exposure two days later, and on July 17 Taylor Farms de Mexico issued a voluntary recall of all iceberg lettuce sourced from its central Mexico operation, ahead of any request from regulators. An initial FDA test the next day reported a positive product sample, but the agency corrected itself a day later, saying the result was a false positive.

That correction turned out to foreshadow a genuinely unusual feature of the investigation: according to the FDA's own outbreak investigation page, roughly 2,000 product samples taken from the central Mexico source since May never once tested positive for Cyclospora. The traceback that identified Taylor Farms lettuce as the vehicle was built entirely on epidemiological case interviews — patients' shared history of eating at specific Taco Bell locations or buying specific retail lettuce — rather than a positive laboratory hit on the product itself. Michigan, which became the epicenter of the outbreak with more than 11,000 of the national cases and both deaths, confirmed the pattern in its own state health department tracking page.

Who was affected

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said the two people who died had "significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration," adding that death from the illness is uncommon in the United States. Among the thousands of milder cases, Valerie Caruso of Geneva, Ohio, said in a federal complaint that she ate Taco Bell's shredded lettuce three times in June, fell ill within days, tested positive for Cyclospora on July 7, and could not take the standard antibiotic treatment because of an allergy, leaving her in what the filing described as "ongoing recovery" weeks later.

Caruso is one of more than 400 plaintiffs now represented in at least five federal lawsuits, including a suit filed by Marler Clark and Darr Law naming Taco Bell Corporation, Taylor Fresh Foods and Taylor Farms California as defendants. It is the fourth time since 2009 that Taylor Farms has been linked to a foodborne-illness outbreak, according to court filings and the firm's own case tracking, including an earlier 2013 Cyclospora outbreak that did not result in a recall.

The scale of the response varied sharply by state. Michigan, which logged more than 11,000 of the national cases, briefly issued a lettuce advisory in early August before easing it as new reports declined; by late August the state's health department said case growth had slowed to a trickle even as the statewide total kept climbing on the strength of earlier infections working their way through the reporting pipeline. Twenty other states recorded far smaller clusters, a pattern investigators attributed to regional distribution routes for the recalled lettuce rather than to any difference in how the illness spreads.

"For ten weeks the government could not bring itself to say 'Taco Bell' and 'Taylor Farms,'" said Bill Marler, the attorney representing hundreds of the plaintiffs, arguing that a voluntary recall is not by itself proof the food-safety system worked.

What happens next

Taylor Farms has said it invests more than $200 million annually in food safety, and that it voluntarily suspended all production at its central Mexico facility on July 18 and has since sourced its summer leafy greens from the United States and Canada instead. "We are confident in our food and food safety systems and will continue to be transparent as more information becomes available," the company said in a statement posted to its own outbreak information page.

The FDA says it will keep investigating the root cause of the contamination even though the outbreak itself has formally closed, and the CDC cautioned that some outbreak-linked cases could still be added to the final tally as lab results and reports continue to trickle in. Several members of Congress have separately pressed the FDA for a fuller account of how a ten-week gap opened between the first case reports and the public identification of Taco Bell and Taylor Farms, a question that is likely to be answered, if at all, in a subsequent agency review rather than in Friday's close-out notice.

For now, the practical guidance from health officials has not changed since July: anyone who develops persistent watery diarrhea after eating fresh produce, especially leafy greens, should tell their doctor when and where they ate and ask specifically about Cyclospora testing, since the standard lab panel often will not catch it on its own. With litigation still active across roughly 20 states and the broader 2026 cyclosporiasis season already the worst on record nationally, both the legal and public-health accounting from this outbreak are likely to continue well past the CDC's official close-out date.