Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that the multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak is “under control” and that federal officials have identified its source.

“We have the outbreak under control,” Kennedy said at a press briefing on healthcare fraud. “We have done extensive forensics, epidemiological forensics, and we’ve identified the source of the outbreak. And the companies that are involved have all implemented a recall.”

Kennedy’s comments came after the Food and Drug Administration on Friday initiated a recall of shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. The recall expanded Saturday to shredded lettuce sold in 27 states, including products sold at retail establishments such as Walmart.

On Sunday, the FDA told Taylor Farms that one test result had been a false positive. The agency later clarified that the erroneous lab result does not undercut the overall investigation. “FDA’s traceback investigation and outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms locations in central Mexico,” the agency said in a statement. Taylor Farms said it voluntarily recalled iceberg lettuce grown and processed in central Mexico “out of an abundance of caution” after receiving the FDA’s initial findings.

The outbreak has spread across at least 34 states, with the Midwest heavily affected. The most recent national data from the CDC, from last week, reported more than 1,600 confirmed cases and 5,100 pending cases of cyclosporiasis. Michigan alone reported more than 6,571 cases, as of Tuesday. The Guardian reported that the outbreak is probably the largest ever documented in the United States.

CDC officials said last week the outbreak is expected to last through August and that cases will probably increase even once sources are identified because the Cyclospora parasite has an incubation period of two days to two weeks.

Public health experts, according to The Guardian, described the CDC’s response as slow and the predictable outcome of severe cuts by the Trump administration. The administration cut $11.4 billion in pandemic-era grants to state and local health departments that had built out outbreak-investigation capacity, fired roughly one-quarter of the CDC’s workforce, and reduced the size of a federal lab dedicated to detecting parasitic outbreaks from 11 staffers to three, losing the head of that lab in a resignation, according to CNN, as reported by The Guardian.

Kennedy addressed the FoodNet program’s reductions during the Tuesday briefing. “We did cuts in the FoodNet program, but they were for redundant surveillance, and all the states will tell you that we’re still doing forensics,” he said. The program, designed to assess broad food-safety trends rather than respond to individual outbreaks, had warned in 2022 that cyclosporiasis cases appeared to be increasing. The Trump administration cut FoodNet’s surveillance from eight pathogens to two — shiga-toxin producing E. coli and salmonella — making surveillance for Cyclospora optional.

On Friday, Kennedy made his first public comments about the outbreak on The Ryan Gorman Show. “There are cyclospora outbreaks every summer,” he said. “Now that we know the probable culprit, I think it’s going to be much easier for people to make healthy choices.”

Cyclospora is a protozoan parasite that prefers warm temperatures, increases annually during summer months, and is typically spread through water and food contaminated with feces. The illness it causes, cyclosporiasis, produces watery and explosive diarrhea.