FDA retracted Cyclospora lettuce test, calling it a false positive
Nick Palmiter, 29, thought his stomach cramps would pass. By the time he visited an urgent care facility in early July, he was using the bathroom 15 to 20 times a day, he said. The facility immediately sent him to the emergency room, where doctors diagnosed him with cyclosporiasis, the intestinal illness caused by the Cyclospora parasite.
“It makes you feel absolutely sick,” Palmiter said. “Like you have nothing left to give.”
Palmiter lives in Monroe County, Michigan, a rural community of roughly 154,000 people that has recorded 286 cases of the illness, making it one of the hardest-hit areas in the largest Cyclospora outbreak recorded in U.S. history. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on July 22 that 4,173 cases had been confirmed across 41 states, with more than 7,400 additional suspected cases under investigation.
The infections were first detected on May 13, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The number of cases has only risen since. Restaurants and major retailers including Walmart, Jack in the Box and Taco Bell have announced they are pulling food from shelves, repeatedly citing “an abundance of caution.” The primary target of the voluntary recalls is iceberg lettuce, but months into the outbreak, the official source of the Cyclospora contamination remains unknown.
Brian Clare, a 52-year-old grain and beef farmer in Monroe County, said he has been dealing with symptoms for over three weeks. He has not been officially diagnosed but said he ate raspberries, which are on the list of foods to watch, and knows at least five other people in the county with cyclosporiasis.
“This is the most painful thing I’ve ever been through in my life,” Clare said. He said he has had to bring rolls of toilet paper with him on his tractor because when he needs to go, he has less than two minutes’ warning.
Clare said he has not sought medical attention. “I’ve not got time to go to no freaking doctor,” he said. “Most farmers try to self-medicate anyway. We don’t have the best insurance in the world.”
The FDA’s investigation appeared to reach a breakthrough when the agency announced that an iceberg lettuce sample from Taylor Farms, a major U.S. food supplier, had tested positive for Cyclospora. Less than 24 hours later, the FDA retracted the announcement, saying the result was a false positive.
Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, said the parasite is “really hard to detect” in the laboratory. “In this case, finding a few cysts of cyclospora in a lettuce sample is literally like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said. He said positive test results are not typically made public without multiple rounds of corroborating testing “to make sure that the positive is indeed a positive.”
“Whether they had sufficient evidence to actually go public, that’s what is questionable,” Diez-Gonzalez said. He said extra precautions around testing are important because inconsistencies risk “making the consumer really wary that we don’t have anybody to trust.”
On July 22, the same day the CDC announced its highest tally of the outbreak, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said cyclosporiasis was “under control.”
Michelle Palmiter, Nick Palmiter’s mother, said the government’s handling of the outbreak has contributed to “panic for people.” She said she was not trusting the government’s statements about the outbreak. She said her niece cleared her entire fridge of produce, including a perfectly good watermelon, and that social media chat boards for Monroe County residents show others taking similar steps. One mother wrote that she has “a whole toddler living off chicken nuggets and Goldfish [crackers] ever since this started.”
Michelle Palmiter said she is still eating fruits and vegetables, but only ones she cooks. “Definitely not going out to eat at all,” she said.