Three questions keep arriving in my inbox: what did industry say, did Congress ever get an answer, and what are the final numbers. Here are the short answers, then the record behind each. Taylor Farms gave a reporter a statement and changed nothing on its own website. The largest produce association answered FDA’s letter to industry with a letter of its own asking FDA to do the root cause work. Fifteen letters from members of Congress have produced no published answer and no hearing. The federal numbers are final. The state numbers are not, and nobody has said they are.

What Taylor Farms said, and where it said it

When FDA closed its investigation on October 2 and reported the parasite in a tank of outgoing wastewater at the Taylor Farms de Mexico plant and in a drainage ditch at a traceback grower, a Taylor Fresh Foods spokesperson told ABC News that the central Mexico facility remains closed while the company works with its research team on enhanced safety protocols, that the independent grower where a positive sample was found is no longer part of its supplier program, and that, as FDA noted, there is not enough evidence to determine how contamination occurred. The company said it remains concerned for the people and families affected. I wrote up what FDA found here.

Read it for what it does not address. The grower with the positive ditch is out. The company’s own plant, where the positive wastewater tank sits, gets the phrase enhanced safety protocols and nothing more specific. The plant has been closed since July 18.

Then go to the company’s Cyclospora information hub. As of this morning it carries a September 1 modification date. It says twice that according to FDA there are no confirmed positive sample results for product testing as of August 27, 2026. It says that confirming a specific product requires a positive laboratory test of the product, that the company’s own testing of roughly 2,000 samples in central Mexico since May returned zero positives, and that water sources are tested for indicator organisms. It says decisions about the future will be based on what the independent third-party review and the FDA investigation find. The FDA investigation has now found, and the page has not moved. The company’s newsroom lists no release on the outbreak at all; the most recent entry is a June 30 scholarship announcement.

In fairness, FDA’s two positives were environmental samples, not product, so the product-testing sentence is still technically true. It is no longer the point; the spokesperson did not repeat it on October 2. And the line that water sources are tested for indicator organisms now sits next to a federal finding of the parasite itself in water leaving the plant.

What the trade associations said

FDA’s letter to industry, dated September 11 and posted September 16, asked every link in the supply chain to develop new science-based practices against this parasite. On September 16, the International Fresh Produce Association sent its own letter to Acting Commissioner Diamantas asking for clearer communication, a transparent root cause analysis, and FDA support for research on traceability in the produce industry. Two letters crossed in the mail, each asking the other side to do the work. IFPA’s Cathy Burns said separately that the association supports putting the Food Traceability Rule into effect without further delay, while wanting workable standards, and IFPA had earlier proposed an FDA-led public-private task force to run the root cause analysis once the investigation closed. Credit where it is owed: that traceability position is the right one, and it puts the growers on the opposite side from the retail associations whose lobbying filings asked Congress for the delay.

IFPA closed its own Cyclospora page on September 14, which I wrote about at the time. As of this morning I can find nothing from IFPA, Western Growers, the leafy greens marketing agreements or Taco Bell on FDA’s October 2 close. Give it until Monday.

Fifteen letters, zero answers, one hearing room

On September 5 I listed thirteen letters from members of the House and Senate, eight of them with deadlines that had already passed. Representative Dingell wrote to USDA on September 14 about the shelved Cyclosporaresearch at Beltsville, and Representative DeLauro wrote to Secretary Rollins on September 17 with twenty-four colleagues from both chambers on the same subject. That is fifteen. I updated the list on September 16 and checked again this week. I cannot find a published answer to any of the fifteen. Not to Representative Garcia’s request for facility records going back to 2013, not to Senator Blumenthal’s two July 30 letters as ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, not to Senator Warren’s nine questions due August 27.

The official answers that exist were given to reporters. HHS’s press secretary told The Hill on August 13 that the response was guided by science and that outbreak investigators were untouched by the staffing cuts, which I recorded then. A USDA spokesperson told Fox stations in late August that Congress did not fund two of the three Beltsville Cyclospora projects for fiscal 2026 and that the third is moving to Iowa. FDA told the New York Times that laid-off travel and foreign-coordination staff had been reinstated. FDA’s October 2 update is the first substantive public answer to any records question Congress asked, and it was addressed to nobody.

No committee has noticed a hearing. The one hearing room this outbreak entered was the Senate HELP Committee’s September 24 confirmation hearing for Dr. Heidi Overton, where it came up in questions and, as Food Safety Magazine reported, the nominee could not identify the FDA office that runs outbreak investigations. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held a hearing on this parasite in imported raspberries in July 1998. Its chairman can issue a subpoena. Its ranking member has already written twice.

The count: the federal numbers are final, the state numbers are not

The outbreak FDA and CDC attribute to the recalled lettuce closed at 12,883 illnesses in 21 states, 570 hospitalizations and two deaths, with the last illness beginning August 17. CDC declared it over on September 11. FDA closed its investigation October 2.

The season count is the number to remember. CDC’s case data page reported 19,883 laboratory-confirmed cases acquired in the United States with onsets between May 1 and August 31, 1,064 hospitalizations, two deaths and 49 states plus the District of Columbia as of its September 15 update, against 1,180 confirmed cases for the same stretch of 2025. Another 9,765 confirmed cases were still being sorted into domestic or travel, and CDC said it was aware of 6,594 more. That is 36,242 people the agency knows about. CDC stopped weekly updates after September 15.

Subtract the outbreak from the season and 7,000 confirmed cases have no food named. FDA’s outbreak table still carries four Cyclospora files, 313 people in all, where the outbreak has ended and no food was ever identified.

The states are a different series, and they are not done. The last time I added up all fifty, on September 3, forty-one states published a 2026 count and those summed to 33,457; Food Safety News carried the tally at 33,548 on September 12. Michigan alone reported 14,718 cases and 366 hospitalizations as of September 3, and its page now says it updates on the first Thursday of each month, which makes October 1 the first new number since the season closed. Indiana closed its count at 2,104 pending a formal close. Nearly every other state stopped updating in late August or September, and none has posted a number it calls final. I will publish a fifty-state closing table, each state’s last posted count and date beside CDC’s, as soon as Michigan’s October figure is in hand.

Marler Clark represents hundreds of people sickened in this outbreak and has filed suits in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois.

Everything that could be closed has been closed. The season closed August 31. CDC closed the outbreak September 11. FDA closed the investigation October 2. The company’s page closed on August 27 and has not reopened. The fifteen letters never opened at all. Two people are dead, 570 went to a hospital in the one outbreak that has a name, 7,000 confirmed cases have none, and the nearest thing to an answer under oath is a confirmation hearing where the parasite was a question. One subpoena would change that.