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Nearly 3,000 people have been sickened with a gastrointestinal illness called cyclosporiasis, a foodborne infection marked by intense, watery diarrhea, according to state health departments across the country.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday that 31 states have reported cases of cyclosporiasis and 86 people have been hospitalized.
Subscribe to read this story ad-freeGet unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.As health officials scramble to find the source of the illnesses, the CDC said it’s unclear whether the outbreaks in different states are connected.The numbers are a sharp rise compared to this time last year, it said.The agency has confirmed 843 of those cases, all acquired in the U.S., and is still investigating more than 1,500.
No deaths have been reported.The outbreak has been particularly intense in Michigan, which had 1,562 cases as of Friday.
Illnesses, caused by the cyclospora parasite, have also been reported in neighboring Ohio, as well as in Colorado, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and other states.Dr.
Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive of Michigan, said the rapid rise is “highly unusual.” The state usually sees 40 to 50 cases of cyclosporiasis a year.She said laboratories in the state are scrambling to sequence the genome of the bug to track where it came from.
“We can see if isolates are closely related, meaning that there was likely a common source, and then we can potentially go back and look for the source of that contamination,” she said.Fresh produce has historically been behind outbreaks.Cyclospora parasites cling to fruit, vegetables and herbs, making them difficult to rinse away.
Dianna Blau, acting chief of the CDC’s Parasitic Disease Branch, said it’s challenging to investigate the outbreaks because it can take a week or more for symptoms to appear.“In an average year, there’s a small proportion of cases that actually get traced back ...