> does not inspire confidence that the current administration's FDA is doing its job properly or has the problem under control.

Given DOGE wiped out the teams responsible for tracking and combating these kinds of outbreaks, no confidence is warranted.

This is similar to how DOGE also wiped out the team responsible for combating screwworms, and surprise surprise, there have been screwworm outbreaks.

Or how Pete Hegseth's change to make flu vaccination optional in the armed services resulted in large outbreaks of the flu among service members.

Also, how Trump in his first term wiped out the CDC's pandemic response team because Obama had created it shortly before a once-in-a-century pandemic occurred.

The current administration has demonstrated incompetence and shortsightedness at a level never before encountered in the US, so you can expect to see even more events like this to occur.

Nah they launched a biological attack against US citizens. They’re basically terrorists and should be treated as such.

same with Taco Bell executives - but customers should only be getting the regular, normal amount of explosive diarrhea from their food.

It depends what you are optimizing for.

An excellent illustration of Chesterton's Fence

Lettuce has a shelf-life of ~4 weeks from harvest, the parasite can incubate for ~2 weeks from consumption, and it may take a week or two for the infected person to see a doctor, get positive test results, and have those results reported to the tracking bodies. That means tracking could easily lag distribution of the bad goods by 2 months.

So, tfa does not really cover this in great depth but it looks like it is mostly over in terms of new cases, at least just looking at the graph. Maybe though it is just a time delay between new cases and reporting.

Operating company that contributes heavily to the Republican administration. Owner of said company went to the White House to have said administration walk back the findings that they are the source of explosive diarrhea. Administration firing a chunk of the staff responsible for tracking and recalling products that cause explosive diarrhea. Administration having folks who don't understand science or health and don't believe in facts in charge of science and health.

This was all expected and will continue

There's two things going on here.

Most people don't report their illnesses, especially minor ones. The people that did report their illness trigger an investigation that then hunts down the people that didn't initially report their illnesses, so a month or two after the initial outbreak, you get numbers that are revised higher.

Regarding the two humps in the illness dates, that's because there's two events involved, over two different supply chains. Restaurant supply chains are faster than retail supply chains, and retail customers don't immediately consume the food they purchase, so the peak illness date from the retail supply chain is much later than the peak illness date from the restaurant supply chain.

It has long been asserted that processed produce is the riskiest way to purchase it. In this particular case, Taco Bell was receiving lettuce that was pre-shredded at a facility. When a consumer or food service kitchen receives pre-processed produce, it's not recommended to wash it again, for reasons.

So, the lettuce was last washed before being shredded. Then it was shredded in machines or by hand or something. It may have been misted, I guess, like you see in some grocery stores, but the point is that there was ample opportunity for contamination by equipment, vessels, or utensils, in the processing facility, during or after washing the whole lettuce.

Watering fields with grey water and whoopsie

Small farmer here: it’s true. Supermarket food is horrible in terms of nutrition and taste, but it’s laden with literal shit too.

For example, milk is pasteurized because dairies are too lazy careless to keep literal shit out of the milk. Sure, they filter out the chunks, but a huge number of pathogens remain.

When heated those cells die, but guess what? All of their cellular machinery is still present in the final product. It can’t infect you as such, but it sure as hell isn’t anything that you should be drinking.

Look up the USDA standards for contamination. Food production involves industrial processes with necessarily loose safety margins, due to the relative scale of operations. If a small farmer caused this outbreak, they would be burnt to the ground, but anyone think this will impact the guilty beyond a minor dip in stock price?

Those corps do not care one whit about individuals any more than Apple or Facebook cares about their customers, unless you count how it affects their next quarterly statements.