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This year's count of confirmed cyclosporiasis cases reached nearly 14,000 this week - seven times the previous record. The CDC also suspects an additional 10,000 cases of the diarrhea-causing bug, largely from contaminated lettuce grown in Mexico. NPR's Yuki Noguchi looks at how this year's federal response has changed.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Until three years ago, epidemiologist Susan Mayne ran the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. She says that branch of the Food and Drug Administration monitors 80% of what the U.S. eats - anything that isn't meat or poultry.
SUSAN MAYNE: It's everything. It's microbial. It's chemical. It's allergens in food. And it also includes nutrition and labeling.
NOGUCHI: In Mayne's day, it employed 1,100 people plus a cadre of inspectors. But she says the Trump administration's sweeping cuts last year, especially to health agencies, eliminated teams who played key roles responding to past crises. That includes staff who worked with FDA counterparts in other countries to coordinate outbreak response.
MAYNE: They were all let go. And now we have this outbreak with Mexico. I don't know who's managing that partnership. Those relationships obviously have been disrupted.
NOGUCHI: In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson for Health and Human Services says that foreign liaison team was reinstated. But what's also been lost, Mayne says, are many microbiologists and epidemiologists doing research on Cyclospora in various federally funded labs. Mayne used to seek advice, for example, from the CDC's Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria. A majority of that lab's funding came from USAID, the international agency the Trump administration shuttered.
MAYNE: That had ramifications for a domestic Cyclospora response because CDC, just like FDA, shares expertise.
NOGUCHI: Mayne says the government's lack of clarity or action in the ongoing outbreak shows just how much has changed with federal readiness, making foodborne illness harder to prevent, harder to trace and harder to contain.
MAYNE: I think that that has really pushed us into a new level of vulnerability in terms of our food safety system.
NOGUCHI: Epidemiologist Dan Jernigan oversaw the CDC's infectious disease unit until resigning last summer. In the past, Jernigan says, those labs helped doctors identify pathogens, for example. But with both funding and staff down by about half, his former colleagues tell him they're triaging, working only on the biggest cases.
DAN JERNIGAN: They historically would help states on every outbreak that they had of Cyclospora. But now they're going to only work on those outbreaks that span multiple states.
NOGUCHI: HHS said in a statement to NPR that the CDC's labs were not affected by cuts. Jernigan says the CDC - also last year - removed six of the eight pathogens it actively tracks through an in-depth foodborne illness surveillance database. Cyclospora was cut.
JERNIGAN: It's the only way that you really have a stable estimate of, are things getting worse or not?
NOGUCHI: Susan Mayne, the former FDA official, points to another factor that might have altered the course of this year's foodborne disease - a food traceability rule from 2011 which was delayed again earlier this year. Mayne says the rule requires barcodes on produce that can track contamination to its source within 24 hours.
MAYNE: And it's not just the trace back. It's also the trace forward. You then have these records to say, where did all that lettuce go?
NOGUCHI: Knowing where contaminated supply traveled, she says, would have helped limit spread.
Yuki Noguchi, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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