{"id":951937,"date":"2026-07-22T13:59:27","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T13:59:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/951937\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T13:59:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T13:59:27","slug":"the-real-trump-scandal-in-the-explosive-diarrhea-outbreak-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/951937\/","title":{"rendered":"The real Trump scandal in the explosive diarrhea outbreak story."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for Executive Dysfunction<\/a>, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is changing the law\u2014or how the law is pushing back. You\u2019ll also receive updates on the latest from Slate\u2019s Jurisprudence team.<\/p>\n

For as common as food poisoning is\u2014according to the Food and Drug Administration, there are approximately 48\u00a0million cases in the U.S. each year\u2014rarely do outbreaks go viral, both literally and culturally, like Cyclospora has over the past month. One reason this outbreak has proved the exception is likely due to the pathogen\u2019s \u201cexplosive diarrhea\u201d side effect, and the lowbrow comedic opportunities that naturally arise. But an even bigger reason is that we continue to know relatively little about its origin. Given the state of epidemiology and data analysis, food poisoning probably shouldn\u2019t be a monthlong mystery, and yet here we are.<\/p>\n

Surely the decimation of federal government agencies<\/a>, among them the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA, factors into why this outbreak remains a mystery. The Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, a collaborative federal-state program led by the CDC, saw its funding drastically cut by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in July 2025, when FoodNet went from surveilling eight pathogens to two<\/a>, with Cyclospora joining Campylobacter, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia on the ignored pile.<\/p>\n

To use the terminology<\/a> of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kennedy has been throwing away umbrellas in the middle of a storm left and right since he took the helm: Monitoring for measles<\/a>, screwworm<\/a>, flu<\/a>, and Ebola<\/a> all saw funding cuts. Who needs umbrellas when you\u2019ve got a tanning bed, a chin-up bar, beef-tallow stockpiles, and a gallon of only-sometimes-poisonous raw milk<\/a>? The CDC and FDA have lost at least 6,000 workers<\/a>, many arbitrarily, many in crucial positions. Kyle Diamantas, a lawyer with no public health credentials and a hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr.<\/a>, now leads the FDA, while Jay Bhattacharya, who made a name for himself advocating for herd immunity<\/a> during the COVID-19 pandemic, leads the CDC.<\/p>\n

Poop jokes and memes aside, cyclosporiasis is a serious parasitic foodborne intestinal illness whose symptoms include nausea, fatigue, and explosive diarrhea that can last weeks or even months without antibiotic treatment. Tracing its source poses particular difficulties for two reasons: an incubation period of up to two weeks before symptoms first appear, and lack of a genetic fingerprint<\/a>, unlike, say, E. coli. Monitoring like FoodNet had previously been doing, is helpful, but it\u2019s difficult to make direct causal connections based on what-ifs, no matter how likely. Moreover, one expert I spoke with, Sarah Taber, a small farmer and crop scientist, describes FoodNet as a \u201clong term library of disease data<\/a>,\u201d not a reactive tool that\u2019s useful in real time. There are more obvious culprits for HHS\u2019s failure to protect Americans from this outbreak.<\/p>\n

The purpose of the Food Safety Modernization Act, passed in 2011 and signed into law by President Barack Obama, with strong bipartisan support, was to shift the federal response to foodborne illnesses from reaction to prevention. Per the act, the FDA was ordered by Congress to establish traceability standards for high-risk foods, but the food industry pushed back, asking for additional time to comply with recordkeeping and coordination demands<\/a>, citing complexity. As the most recent due date approached this past January, Congress stepped in, instructing the agency to delay enforcement of the Food Traceability Rule until July\u00a020, 2028. Seventeen years after the FSMA was passed, the FDA is still reacting to the sorts of foodborne illness breakouts the act was intended to preemptively address.<\/p>\n

The FTR, if it ever becomes enforceable, would require entities directly involved in the food supply chain to keep electronic records documenting \u201ccritical tracking events\u201d and predefined \u201ckey data elements\u201d of any foods on a \u201cFood Traceability List,\u201d enabling the FDA to track contaminated food through the supply chain much more rapidly during outbreak investigations.<\/p>\n

Everyone I spoke with described the current process of tracing foodborne illnesses as laborious and slow and hampered by an absence of a unified approach. State health agencies take the lead in interviewing patients, and those agencies are disparately funded<\/a>. Impacted companies also do much of the investigative legwork, out of necessity and self-interest.<\/p>\n

Last week, Taco Bell announced that it had voluntarily removed potentially affected lettuce from its supply chain; the FDA followed up the same night<\/a> with an announcement of its own, stating that per \u201cepidemiological information collected by CDC,\u201d 1,644 people infected with Cyclospora reported having also eaten at Taco Bell in five states between May\u00a013 and July\u00a013. The FDA\u2019s release also noted that its own investigation identified a \u201csingle supplier of iceberg lettuce from Mexico used by Taco Bell,\u201d but oddly declined to name the supplier.<\/p>\n

The next day, that name emerged: California-based Taylor Farms, the third-largest producer of fresh produce<\/a> in the U.S., specializing in packaged salad kits and fresh-cut vegetables. The company, which employs at least 20,000 people and operates an estimated 30 processing plants, reported $6\u00a0billion in revenue<\/a> in 2022.<\/p>\n

Less than 24 hours after the FDA had warned the public about Taco Bell in five states, Taylor Farms quietly issued a recall notice identifying a string of products from its plant in Central Mexico that had been distributed between June\u00a029 and July\u00a016 to 29 U.S. states. The recall notice is remarkable in its opacity, identifying the outlets by internal code names instead of ones the public would recognize (e.g., MARK, rather than Walmart). The FDA\u2019s accompanying announcement<\/a> was also odd, choosing to pinpoint the supplier as \u201cTaylor Farms de Mexico\u202fof Guanajuato, Mexico,\u201d as if to subtly insinuate that the company was Mexican instead of a Californian company operating a plant in Mexico.<\/p>\n

Taylor Farms provided more fuel for suspicion after it removed a note from its website that had claimed that \u201cno Taylor Farms\u2013branded salads or kits are associated with this outbreak,\u201d an omission that was caught<\/a> by Consumer Reports\u2019 Paris Martineau, who pointed to the inclusion of a TF brand in Taylor Farms\u2019 recall notice. Does TF stand for Taylor Farms? Maybe, and perhaps even probably, but who can actually say? Not the public.<\/p>\n

According to the New York Times, the very same night the agency was blaming Taco Bell, Taylor Farms executives were meeting with officials from the White House and the FDA<\/a> \u201cto try and distance the company from the outbreak and air concerns about the official investigations into the outbreak.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the obfuscatory messaging and attempts to duck transparency by the seemingly concerted efforts of the FDA and Taylor Farms aren\u2019t yet painting a clear picture, consider also that Taylor Farms (as Taylor Fresh Foods Inc.) donated $1\u00a0million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC on March\u00a026, 2025<\/a>, less than a week after the agency announced that it would delay enforceability of the FTC until 2028. Taylor Farms has donated more than $3.8\u00a0million to conservative groups<\/a>, and CEO and founder Bruce Taylor has personally donated more than $1\u00a0million to Republican-aligned PACs over the past two decades.<\/p>\n

Then, on Sunday, the story got much stranger when the FDA announced<\/a> that the sample provided by \u201cTaylor Farms de Mexico,\u201d which had initially tested positive, was actually a false positive. Taylor Farms quickly issued an audacious statement<\/a>: \u201cToday, FDA apologized to us,\u201d which is not what the agency did<\/a>. Did the FDA run interference for Taylor Farms? That seems exceedingly likely. Did it confuse the public? Definitely.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Nadira Goffe
\n The \u201cExplosive Diarrhea\u201d Outbreak May Come Down to a Familiar Culprit. This Keeps Happening for a Reason.
\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Jennifer McEntire, a food safety consultant, assured me that this statement in no way exonerates Taylor Farms, because it \u201cdoes not change the traceback (combing through supply chain records to reconstruct the path products took in order to see if, when looking at all the places ill people ate, they have a common source) and epidemiology that led the agency to implicate Taylor Farms Mexico facility.\u201d<\/p>\n

I also spoke with Bill Marler, a Washington-based attorney who has litigated numerous food poisoning cases against the food industry, who made a similar point on his blog<\/a>: \u201cThe lots that sickened more than a thousand confirmed cases\u2014against state-reported numbers many times higher\u2014were eaten and thrown away long before anyone thought to swab anything. A negative product sample in a Cyclospora outbreak, or the absence of a positive one, proves nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

    \n
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    The Real Trump Scandal in the Explosive Diarrhea Outbreak Story
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    Indeed, both the FDA and Taylor Farms made clear that the company, \u201cin an abundance of caution,\u201d will go through with the \u201cvoluntary\u201d recall. But the public messaging could not be more duplicitous. At a time when the CDC has tracked nearly 7,000 confirmed cases nationwide, 4,300 of them in Michigan\u2014all surely undercounts<\/a>, given that many people won\u2019t bother to seek medical care for diarrhea\u2014the FDA appears preoccupied with affording Taylor Farms a degree of plausible deniability, while amplifying its clunky attempts to shift blame onto Mexico and Taco Bell. These tasks are in sharp conflict with the agency\u2019s congressional mandate to serve the public, whose trust in the government is already at a historic low<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Of course, so much of what\u2019s otherwise known points a finger directly back at Taylor Farms, false-positive atom splitting notwithstanding, and there\u2019s only so much the company can do to deflect. Its PR team would likely better serve Taylor Farms by being fully transparent with the public, but it perhaps shouldn\u2019t surprise anyone that a company willing to align itself with this administration, as Taylor Farms has, would approach admitting fault as a third rail.<\/p>\n

    Improving food traceability in response to foodborne illnesses was unambiguously addressed by Congress 15 years ago, but the players to whom it would apply and obligate, Taylor Farms prominent among them, are squarely in the way of its implementation.<\/p>\n

    Delivered every Thursday morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":951938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[69,12833,990,210,1141,96865,50,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-951937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","category-us","tag-donald-trump","tag-farming","tag-food","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-jurisprudence","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116963991079443789","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/951937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=951937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/951937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/951938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=951937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=951937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=951937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}