How concerned you should be about the risk of contracting cyclosporiasis may depend on where you live. Although headlines may lead you to believe that the entire country is awash with illnesses, a look at the numbers shows that’s not the case.
Clearly, there’s a concerning issue in the five states where a majority of cases are clustered. And a few other states, such as New York and Illinois, are reporting somewhat higher than average case numbers for this time of year.
But it’s unclear whether these infections are linked to the outbreak involving iceberg lettuce in Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana, are part of an unrelated outbreak of unknown origin, or merely reflect the typical increase in illnesses caused by cyclospora seen during the summer months.
For example, Marissa Crary, a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Health, said on July 17 that preliminary data indicates there have been “approximately 576” cases of cyclosporiasis reported since May and that the state typically records between 500 and 700 cases per year. “New York’s current cases statewide do not represent a major deviation from the norm,” Crary told Consumer Reports.
Illinois had recorded 355 cases as of July 20, though only 180 appear to have been domestically acquired (cyclosporiasis is commonly picked up while traveling abroad), Matthew Mata, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Public Health, told Consumer Reports. That total is “higher than average,” he said, but “no single source or cause of this increase has been identified, and there is no evidence of a large outbreak accounting for all or most of these cases.”
But in many other states, such as California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, case counts so far are at or below typical levels for this time of year. Amy Barrett, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Health, said that although 66 cases have been reported since May 1, “none of Minnesota’s cases were linked to the multistate outbreak, and we are not seeing an increase in cases over what we would expect for this time of year.” Similarly, California health officials said on July 14 that the state has seen fewer cases of cyclosporiasis so far this year than it did over the same period in 2025.
