Taylor Farms pulls iceberg lettuce from the US market after cyclosporiasis outbreak

Everything we know so far about the cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Food producer Taylor Farms released a statement on the Cyclospora outbreak Friday, confirming that it’s “voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from the US market.” Reuters reports that, according to a source, Taylor Farms told customers like Yum Brands owner Taco Bell and the food distributor Sysco on Thursday to pull shredded lettuce that had been produced initially as 5-pound bags at a facility in Guanajuato, Mexico, from distribution.

Taco Bell said on Thursday that “The affected ingredient from our supplier is being indefinitely removed from our supply chain nationwide and will be replaced within 24 hours in select states.”

The Cyclospora parasite infects humans’ small intestine, can take up to one to two weeks to incubate, and causes symptoms including “watery diarrhea, with frequent bowel movements… vomiting, body aches, headache, low-grade fever, and other flu-like symptoms,” that may seem to go away and then come back more than once.

As The Verge reported this week , not all of the reported cases have been linked to Taco Bell, and Taylor Farms is a giant, which has said it sells more than $7 billion in produce every year and makes two out of every five of the salad kits sold in grocery stores. However, its name doesn’t appear on most of those items, and while the extent of the outbreak is still under investigation, the CDC has said it’s also looking into illnesses and outbreaks in other states that are unrelated.

Based on information provided yesterday by the FDA, Taylor Farms de Mexico is voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from the U.S. market. While the FDA traceback is indicating a specific independent farm that represents less than 1% of the U.S.’s iceberg lettuce supply as the potential source of the outbreak, we have removed all iceberg lettuce from the region indefinitely.

It hasn’t identified other companies or products to avoid yet. ProPublica’s Annie Waldman reports that the tracing effort is working without more than 240 consumer safety specialists who left as the Trump administration cut funding to federal health agencies, and the CDC scaled back its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) that worked with 10 states.