The cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations has grown to 1,947 laboratory-confirmed cases across nine states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported, adding Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to a list that stood at five states a week earlier. There have been at least 98 hospitalisations and no deaths.
The more consequential figure sits on a different CDC page. In its national cyclosporiasis surveillance update, published 24 July, the agency reported 4,173 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases since the season opened on 1 May, and said it was aware of more than 7,400 additional cases that are not yet laboratory confirmed and require further investigation — many of them reported by Michigan and Ohio.
Those two numbers together settle a question this site raised on 22 July. The Fold reported then that Michigan’s health department was publishing 7,171 cases while the CDC’s outbreak count stood at 1,644, a gap of more than four times, and treated the discrepancy between the two agencies as the story. The surveillance page now supplies the reconciliation, and it is a matter of denominators rather than disagreement: Michigan publishes a statewide total that includes probable cases, while the outbreak figure counts only laboratory-confirmed infections that are also linked to Taco Bell exposure across the nine states involved. "CDC’s surveillance updates do not include probable cases," the agency notes. "State data may include probable and confirmed cases, resulting in higher case counts than what CDC reports."
Read that way, the arithmetic is unflattering to the idea that the recall closes the matter. The outbreak’s 1,947 cases represent about 47 percent of the 4,173 laboratory-confirmed cases the CDC has recorded nationally this season. Measured against the roughly 11,600 cases the agency has either confirmed or is aware of, the named-source outbreak accounts for about 17 percent. The remainder are cases the CDC has not tied to Taylor Farms de Mexico, and in a normal year cyclosporiasis in the United States runs at a fraction of this volume, which is why the agency has moved to weekly rather than periodic surveillance updates for 2026.
The recall itself has widened. On 17 July Taylor Farms de Mexico recalled all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico, and the notice from Taylor Fresh Foods extended to Marketside-brand product sold at Walmart — moving the exposure from a foodservice problem, where a diner has no way of knowing which supplier fed a given restaurant, to a retail one, where consumers can check a bag in their own refrigerator.
The outbreak’s defined illness window has also moved. The CDC now dates onsets in the multistate cluster from 22 June through 20 July; its previous update gave a range running from 13 May. Nationally the median onset date is 26 June, the median patient age is 44, cases run from age two to 95, and 56 percent of those infected are female.
All of these counts are provisional in a specific way that matters for reading them. Cyclospora takes as long as six weeks to confirm as outbreak-associated, so the CDC assumes a reporting lag of roughly that length between when someone falls ill and when the case reaches its tally. Some of the 7,400 unconfirmed reports will be added to the outbreak total in the coming weeks, which would raise the recall’s share; others will resolve as unrelated infections, which would lower it.
What has not happened is a positive laboratory sample from the implicated lettuce. The FDA announced one on 18 July and retracted it the following day as a false positive that did "not represent true amplification," leaving the case against Taylor Farms de Mexico resting on epidemiology and traceback rather than a physical match — the same position it occupied a week ago, and the reason this outbreak’s edges remain hard to draw.