Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

Over the past few weeks, thousands of Americans across more than thirty states have been infected by cyclospora, a single-celled parasite that causes explosive diarrhea, which can lead to severe dehydration. The disease is linked to fresh produce contaminated by human waste, and reaches consumers most easily through leafy greens and berries that are hard to wash and often eaten raw. 

As cyclospora infections have surged, especially in the Midwest and along the East Coast, the public health response has been slow. That’s partly a function of the weeklong incubation period, which makes it hard to link the parasite to certain foods. But Céline Gounder, an internist and infectious-disease doctor who is CBS News’s medical correspondent and the editor at large for public health at KFF Health News, views the story as the latest visible effect of the Trump administration’s cuts to public health services. “Tracing outbreaks is the job of the government and the private sector, and the media must hold them accountable on behalf of the public, so that people can put pressure on their elected officials,” she told me. Now it’s up to journalists to do “shoe-leather epidemiology” and tell people that the outbreak could have been prevented if it weren’t for DOGE. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

ILN: How would you rate media coverage of cyclospora so far? Is the press being alarmist, reasonable, or too calm?

CG: I think they are missing the bigger picture. The real issue is that it’s a symptom of cuts made at the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration. Take the false-positive test result for cyclospora in the Taylor Farms lettuce sample. With these kinds of tests, there are a lot of problems with contamination and cross-reactivity, so you would need strict quality control—but one of the cuts last year was made at the quality control lab at the FDA.

Another program that suffered cuts is called FoodNet, a collaboration across the CDC, the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, and the state and local health departments. They’re doing surveillance: since you always have some level of foodborne infections, you want to have a baseline, so you can see if there’s a spike above normal. FoodNet used to track eight pathogens, but a little over a year ago, it went down to just salmonella and E. coli. Cyclospora was one of the ones that was cut. So now public health officials are going to be slower to realize that there’s an issue.

These are the kinds of things that don’t necessarily make sense if you’re not an expert. And when you have twentysomethings running DOGE cuts, they’re certainly not going to understand their value.

Is this a particularly bad outbreak—or a particularly badly tracked outbreak?

I think the latter. I call situations “bad” if people can get very sick to a point where they end up in the hospital. Cyclospora can make you feel miserable, but not very sick by that definition, unless you’re someone who can’t keep up with fluid losses, like children, the elderly, or those who are immunocompromised or have other underlying medical conditions. This is not something that the average person needs to be afraid of—other than, you know, it’s not fun to have explosive, watery diarrhea that lingers for a while.

This goes back to the previous question: there is a certain level of squeamishness, especially in television, about using the term “explosive diarrhea.” We need to use words that people understand, even if they are a little gross. As a clinician and scientist, when I speak to my patients, I don’t speak in code—otherwise I’m not providing a service.

How are public health reporters trying to get to the bottom of this? How can you track down outbreaks and supply chains if the government is increasingly absent?

It’s not just the government. It’s that Taylor Farms is not transparent at all. It’s what we would call old-fashioned shoe-leather epidemiology, looking through what people have been eating. The lab testing is just the cherry on top.  

What resources are available for public health reporters? Are government agencies responsive?

For the CDC, the FDA, and other government agencies, all media relations have been centralized through the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s basically two people who respond to everything, which you can imagine is an impossible task. It seems like they are batching responses, in part because they lack capacity, and in part because they want to control the message and don’t necessarily want to answer every question that’s being posed. So they give you a general statement that probably addresses what a lot of people are asking, but not all the individual questions.

What do you think the role of the press is when the government’s response is lackluster and there’s clearly a public appetite for information?

You have the micro level: the different kinds of information that need to be provided, the basics on how to keep yourself safe, that rinsing your produce is not enough, that you need to peel or cook everything, that freezing only lowers the risk but doesn’t get rid of it entirely. We also have to debunk what’s circulating online now. For instance, using chlorine or vinegar to wash your produce doesn’t solve anything.

But the macro level is what I consider more important. The media hasn’t done a good job connecting the various cuts to what’s happening right now. Some of the more elite publications, like the New York Times, have been doing this kind of reporting, but other media don’t consistently do that.

A couple of months ago the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship raised similar concerns about the impact of systemic cuts during a public health emergency. As someone who covers public health, how does this new normal change your approach to your beat?

To be fair, there has been a tightening of access to public health officials under both Democratic and Republican administrations over the last twenty years. The media communications out of HHS—that is new, and that creates a bottleneck. It also makes it very difficult to get answers to specific, more technical questions. There have always been people who leak and provide some of that information, but now people are really afraid of retaliation, and they are even more circumspect about what they say. To have any kind of relationship with a reporter is a scarlet letter, so to speak.

State and local agencies remain a very important source of information. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the CDC only provides support and technical expertise; it’s the states that are running the show. But that, again, really depends on how much information the states provide. I think one of the reasons we’ve seen such a concentration of cases and reporting out of Michigan is because they have been more transparent and more aggressive about investigating and testing. In reality, we still don’t know which state has been the most affected.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.