Last year's funding cuts to federal agencies that oversee foodborne illness outbreaks are being tested with the record cyclosporiasis outbreak in the U.S. This year's count of confirmed cyclosporiasis cases reached nearly 14,000 this week - seven times the previous record. The CDC also suspects an additional 10,000 cases of the diarrhea-causing bug, largely from contaminated lettuce grown in Mexico.
NPR's Yuki Noguchi looks at how this year's federal response has changed. YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Until three years ago, epidemiologist Susan Mayne ran the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. She says that branch of the Food and Drug Administration monitors 80% of what the U.S. eats - anything that isn't meat or poultry.
SUSAN MAYNE: It's everything. And it also includes nutrition and labeling. NOGUCHI: In Mayne's day, it employed 1,100 people plus a cadre of inspectors.
But she says the Trump administration's sweeping cuts last year, especially to health agencies, eliminated teams who played key roles responding to past crises. That includes staff who worked with FDA counterparts in other countries to coordinate outbreak response. MAYNE: They were all let go.
And now we have this outbreak with Mexico. I don't know who's managing that partnership. Those relationships obviously have been disrupted.
NOGUCHI: In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson for Health and Human Services says that foreign liaison team was reinstated. But what's also been lost, Mayne says, are many microbiologists and epidemiologists doing research on Cyclospora in various federally funded labs. Mayne used to seek advice, for example, from the CDC's Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria.
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