Bob Custard spent four decades working with local governments on clean water, rabies prevention and food safety. Now a public health consultant and president of the West Virginia Association of Sanitarians, Custard says cuts to federal funding have left food-safety programs across states dramatically understaffed. With a record cyclosporiasis outbreak concentrated in nearby states, he warned that health departments cannot keep up with the interviews and investigations needed to track and contain the parasite. “It’s like we have a house, and we decided to take smoke detectors out,” Custard said.
Susan Mayne, an epidemiologist who ran the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition until three years ago, echoed that concern. She said the federal response to the outbreak that began in May has been slow and shows how fractured national food-safety programs have become. Mayne said teams that once coordinated public-awareness campaigns and international crisis response were eliminated during last year’s broad federal cuts, and that disruption has damaged relationships with partner agencies in other countries.
The current outbreak has been mostly linked to contaminated iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed more than 15,700 cases, according to the most recent counts. Scientists and food-safety experts say the reductions in staff and funding—felt at local health departments, state agencies and federal laboratories—are hampering the practical work of identifying sources, tracing contaminated supplies and stopping spread.
In response, the Department of Health and Human Services told reporters the Human Foods Program staff who work with foreign regulatory counterparts have been reinstated. The FDA said it continues to work with federal, state and international partners to investigate the outbreaks and deploys personnel where they have the greatest public-health impact.
State-level impacts vary. Much of states’ outbreak work depends on grants from the CDC and FDA, and last year federal grant funding was sharply cut—CDC grants alone were reduced by about 40 percent, roughly $5.8 billion as of May. Kentucky’s health department reports food-safety staff reductions of 30 to 50 percent. Ohio said its Cyclospora response is unaffected by staffing changes. Michigan, which has the highest caseload, successfully fought grant cuts in court and says surveillance, investigations and public messaging are continuing for now.
In West Virginia, Custard described deeper problems: counties that once employed four full-time sanitarians are down to two, and some have lost their only epidemiologist for foodborne illness investigations. Looking at the state’s staffing chart, Custard said roughly half of food-safety positions are vacant. Low pay and lack of funding prompted lawmakers to lower the educational requirement for sanitarians from a four-year degree to a two-year associate’s degree earlier this year—a change Custard said weakens the scientific foundation of a demanding job.
Experts argue those local weaknesses ripple upward. If local reporting falters, state-level data are incomplete, and national surveillance suffers.
Sarah Sorscher, director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said delays and a lack of clear information during outbreaks are symptoms of a broader crisis in state and local public health. The public’s confusion over what is safe to eat, she added, is itself a cost to health.
Beyond funding, public-health agencies have also lost technical support that once came from the CDC, the FDA and international development programs. Mayne noted that agencies at FDA used to consult microbiologists and epidemiologists at the CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria for advice on Cyclospora and other parasites. Much of that work was financed by the former U.S. Agency for International Development; after parts of USAID were cut back or moved, those funding streams dried up, she said, with consequences for domestic outbreak response.
Dan Jernigan, who until recently led the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases before resigning amid leadership changes, said laboratory capacity has also been eroded. He described labs that once helped clinicians identify pathogens and sequence them to guide treatment and tracing; those labs are now operating with staffing shortfalls and are forced to triage, focusing only on the largest multi-state outbreaks instead of assisting every state-level event.
HHS said the CDC laboratory supporting the Cyclospora response was not affected by reductions in force. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which once ran parasitology labs that researched Cyclospora, told reporters that Cyclospora research continues without disruption, though internal communications reviewed by journalists suggested staff at two Beltsville, Md., labs were told to relocate or face job loss and that much research activity had been halted.
Public-health experts worry the system is becoming less able to prevent, trace and contain foodborne disease. Jernigan pointed out that last year the CDC removed Cyclospora and five other pathogens from a surveillance program called FoodNet, which had provided in-depth data that help track whether foodborne illnesses are increasing or decreasing over time.
Mayne highlighted another factor: the delayed implementation of a long-planned traceability rule. When fully implemented, the rule would require bar codes or similar identifiers for batches of produce so contamination can be traced to a field or facility within 24 hours. Had that system been in place earlier this year, she said, traceback and forward-trace records might have identified contaminated lettuce sooner and limited the outbreak’s spread.
For public-health veterans like Custard, the current crisis is predictable and preventable. “We keep taking the smoke detectors out of the house, hoping that there won’t be a fire—and yet we keep seeing fires from time to time,” he said. The outbreak has laid bare how gaps in staffing, funding and coordination can translate into greater risk for consumers across the country.