Environmental health expert Bob Custard spent four decades working with local governments on things like clean water, rabies prevention and food safety. He also represents 160 others doing that kind of work as president of the West Virginia Association of Sanitarians. With the largest-ever cyclosporiasis outbreak concentrated in nearby states, Custard – now a public health consultant – said federal funding cuts have left local food safety programs across the state grossly understaffed.
Health officials are unable to keep pace with the interviews and investigations needed to track and contain the diarrhea-causing bug. "It's like we have a house, and we decided to take smoke detectors out," Custard said of the current approach to foodborne illness. Meanwhile, epidemiologist Susan Mayne said the government has responded slowly to the record-shattering outbreak that started in May, which demonstrates how the nation's federal food safety programs are in disarray.
That includes the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (now part of the Human Foods Program), which she ran until three years ago. Mayne said teams of staff who played critical roles in public-awareness campaigns and crisis-response coordination with counterparts in other countries were eliminated in the sweeping Trump administration cuts to the federal government last year that hit public health functions particularly hard. "And now we have this outbreak with Mexico – I don't know who's managing that partnership, [but] those relationships obviously have been disrupted," Mayne said.
The summer's cyclosporiasis outbreak has been mostly linked to contaminated iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico. The U.S. now has over 15,700 cases confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of this week. It's occurring in the wake of those funding and staff reductions, and Mayne echoed other scientists and food safety experts who said that is affecting the ground game against Cyclospora – from the local county levels, all the way to the federal agencies that fund nearly all of the country's food safety programs.
"I think that that has really pushed us into a new level of vulnerability in terms of our food safety system," Mayne said. Want the latest stories on the science of healthy living? Subscribe to NPR's Health newsletter.
In a statement to NPR, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA and CDC, said that the Human Foods Program staff who work with foreign regulatory counterparts had been reinstated. Separately, the FDA said in a statement to NPR that it "continues to work with federal, state and international partners to investigate these outbreaks," and that it "deploys personnel where they have the greatest public health impact." Most of the states' food safety and outbreak programs are funded by grants from the FDA and CDC. Last year, the Trump administration slashed the CDC's grants alone by 40% — about $5.8 billion as of May.
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