The Outbreak Trump's CDC Refuses to Track
30 states, nearly 3,000 cases, zero federal data — by design.
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by David Shuster
Most of us know that you can’t stop a clogged/overflowing toilet by closing the bathroom door, turning off the lights, and looking away. Yet, that is the governing philosophy of Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Junior, and their Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. And now, the disgusting consequences are getting worse.
Before we get to the graphic and nauseating details, let me back up. Once upon a time, the federal government’s CDC maintained a robust surveillance and interdiction system – known as FoodNet – to control and stop foodborne diseases across the United States.
Cyclosporiasis, for example, is known for causing explosive and seemingly endless diarrhea, dehydration, and exhaustion.
▶ SPONSORED BY GROUND NEWS — A quick word from the sponsor that makes this column possible, and that, unlike the CDC, still believes in tracking things.
When the federal government stops collecting the data, the reporting doesn’t vanish; it just scatters. Right now more than 80 separate outlets are covering this cyclospora outbreak, and they do not agree on how alarmed you should be.
That’s the exact problem Ground News was built to solve.
It pulls every story on a topic into one place and shows you, source by source, who’s covering it, whether they lean left, center, or right, and what each side is leaving out. You get to watch this outbreak the way an epidemiologist watches a pathogen: from every angle at once, with the blind spots flagged.
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Essentially, the Cyclospora pathogen travels on fruits and vegetables exposed to feces contaminated irrigation water.
When Cyclospora is consumed by humans, it settles in the lower intestine, rearranges the plumbing, and sends its hosts into frantic negotiations with porcelain.
For decades, CDC epidemiologists counted cases, looked for patterns, traced outbreaks, and tried to determine which salad or berry had become the latest Trojan horse for intestinal catastrophe. It was the sort of work that never earned much attention because success in public health is measured by disasters that do not occur.
However, in July 2025, the geniuses in the Trump administration, intoxicated by DOGE and the perfume of wishful thinking, looked at disease surveillance and saw not an insurance policy but an expense account.
Why pay scientists to count parasites? Why bother collecting data? Why maintain an early-warning system when the Trump administration can instead issue triumphant speeches about efficiency?
So, the CDC stopped monitoring Cyclospora. Other pathogens—including Listeria, Shigella, Campylobacter, Vibrio, and Yersinia—were also removed from the program’s core surveillance activities. (The Trump CDC has continued to monitor the most common pathogens – e-coli and salmonella).
Just one year later, health officials in 30 states are now reporting a Cyclosporiasis eruption.
Hospitals and medical clinics have confirmed nearly 3,000 cases. It is already one of the largest outbreaks in U.S. history. And with no federal monitoring or tracking data to pinpoint how it started or what food sources are contaminated and spreading it, the nastiness is intensifying.
Michigan has been especially hard hit with health officials reporting over 2,600 cases in the last month, compared to the average number of 50 in an entire year. Over the border, health authorities in Ohio are reporting 200 cases. The health departments in each state have been unable to identify a source of the outbreak, or a direction, largely because there has been no federal tracking effort.
As of this column, no deaths have been reported. However, as the outbreak spreads, mortality cases are expected. Cyclospora infections usually involve weeks of intense and watery diarrhea that can eventually turn fatal.
To be fair, cutting surveillance did not create Cyclospora any more than smashing a thermometer creates a fever. But if you decide that counting and investigating cases is an unnecessary luxury, you also decide that outbreaks will become murkier, slower to understand, and harder to contain. The parasite continues its march through the digestive tract while the Trump administration congratulates itself for having saved a few bucks in CDC costs.
Never mind that the cost of lost productivity from workers who are staying on their toilets for weeks already exceeds the amount of federal dollars the Trump team chose to cut.
There is a peculiar genius to this Trump form of governance. It resembles a dog owner who discovers poop on the living-room carpet and responds not by cleaning up the feces but by selling off the paper towels and vacuum cleaner. The MAGA pet owner then boasts that household expenditures have dropped by 12 percent, even though the aroma and stench eventually ruin other items including the carpet, clothes, furniture. Replacing such items brings a new cost.
Relatedly, public health is about prevention and treatment. Keeping down foodborne illnesses means monitoring microbes, sewage, spoiled lettuce, contaminated raspberries, and other items that may have been irrigated or handled improperly.
Most politicians, including Trump, prefer things that are bigger. Nobody ever chants, “What do we want? Better epidemiological surveillance!” Yet our nation depends just as much on people who inspect our food as on people who watch our borders.
▶ SPONSORED BY GROUND NEWS — Speaking of evidence: this column is sponsored by Ground News, and there’s a reason it fits. Biology revolves around evidence; so should your news diet.
When a story like this breaks, left-leaning outlets frame it as a “massive, fast-growing” scandal and right-leaning outlets frame it as a contained blip “within the normal range.”
Ground News lays those framings side by side so you can see the spin instead of swimming in it, and its Blindspot feed shows you the stories one side is barely covering at all.
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Diseases do not respect or care about slogans. Parasites are indifferent to DOGE talking points. They cannot be persuaded by bombastic Trump press conferences. They cannot be frightened by executive orders. They respond only to biology—and biology has a habit of revolving around evidence.
Evidence, unfortunately, requires data.
And data requires people, laboratories, and budgets.
Those are exactly the things that have become expendable under Trump. It’s all random and dependent on Trump’s gut feelings. There is no planning and no consultation with experts. Iran? The Lincoln reflecting pool? The economy? Everything Trump touches turns to shit. Only now by touching and gutting the CDC, thousands of Americans are literally shitting uncontrollably.
There is a fitting symbolism in all of this. An administration that refuses to keep track of a disease has concluded that the best response to a torrent of excrement is to stop looking at the toilet.
▶ SPONSORED BY GROUND NEWS — One last note before Nature balances the books: the whole lesson of this column is that you can’t manage what you refuse to measure.
That goes for parasites, and it goes for the news. Ground News hands you the measuring tools the CDC just threw away: every source on a story, its bias rating, its factuality, and what’s missing from the coverage.
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It’s the cheapest insurance policy in this entire column.
The result, predictably, is that the sewage keeps flowing, the misery keeps rising, and costs keep surging.
Nature, unlike Trump, always balances the books.
Such a way with words! If DJT had won in 2020 half of us would have been dead of Covid
I had this, and it distroyed my relationship, my partner couldn’t handle my illness