Bonjour,
Deana and I are in Italy, sweating and working OT on a certain corner of the internet:
ily,
Don’t miss episode 6 of Show Me Your Stack with Sam Hogan. Out today!
If you’ve been on Twitter or hospitalized for explosive diarrhea this week, you’ve heard of the latest parasite spreading through the United States.
Cyclosporiasis is having its breakout moment, with over 1,600 confirmed cases across 34 states and another 5,100 additional cases being analyzed. Of those 1,600 confirmed cases, nearly 10% of victims have been hospitalized for non-stop GI issues that can last for weeks.
The number is climbing every day, and the culprit seems to be bagged lettuce, potentially originating from Taco Bell. The combination of the internet's love for bathroom humor (not me), Taco Bell as a main character in the story, and the idea that eating lettuce is in fact bad for you has made this ripe for internet users to turn this public health crisis into a meme before most people even know how to pronounce it.
The earliest documented case had symptom onset on May 1, and though the produce supply chain has a long, unresolved history with this specific pathogen, the CDC cannot seem to pin down where this parasite came from.
You see, the CDC has a program called FoodNet that tracks 8 major foodborne pathogens, cyclospora included. Last summer, RFK Jr. cut funding to the program. As part of that cut, reporting cyclosporiasis to federal health officials went from required to optional. This is why the jokes on X range from calling it "poor man's Ozempic" to dunking on the 26th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr.
Funny enough, Reddit got to tracing the potential source of the parasite before the reporting caught up. Taylor Farms is one of the largest fresh-cut produce suppliers in the US, and they have a spotty track record: their Mexico division was tied to a cyclosporiasis outbreak in 2013, and the company was tied to E. coli outbreaks in 2015 and 2024. The investigative mods of Reddit and keyboard journalists took to the internet to speculate Taylor Farms was probably to blame. Then late last night:
Avid readers know, this month we're covering Hot Girl Science in this newsletter, and I can think of nothing more accurate for hot girls than tummy issues. But a detail about this parasite that few are reporting on is the potential toll it takes on sleep. The reason for this is that your gut bacteria run on a circadian clock of their own, synced to when you eat, and that clock is in constant conversation with the one regulating your sleep. So shitting yourself for weeks on end might get you snatched but could potentially destroy your sleep too. You really can’t have it all.
