Trump’s latest public health initiative: explosive diarrhea
This administration is the best thing that ever happened to cyclosporiasis.
PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
Donald Trump is the face of hate. He is the face of war. He is the face of a pandemic. And now he is the orange, sagging face of explosive diarrhea.
This month, there has been a major outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a relatively rare food-borne illness caused by a microscopic single celled parasite. Cases have been reported in 30 states, with a record shattering 4,300 instances in Michigan alone.
The CDC identified shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell as one cause of infection in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. The restaurant took swift action to remove the produce, but there may well be other sources. Initially the FDA said the Taco Bell lettuce came from Taylor Farms; this week though it said the test was a false positive — a mistake that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
Not coincidentally, it has been about a year since Trump’s indefatigably pro-disease HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took cyclosporiasis and a range of other foodborne illnesses off a mandatory reporting list while instituting draconian cuts at the Center for Disease Control.
Slashing government capacity makes it harder to identify outbreaks early and harder to end them quickly. Cyclosporiasis is teaching us a painful, embarrassing, and fairly obvious lesson: when you launch an all-out assault on public health, you get explosive diarrhea — and worse than explosive diarrhea.
Spreading misery
Fortunately, cyclosporiasis is very rarely fatal. But it is extremely unpleasant, and can lead to serious complications for the young, the elderly, or those with disabilities.
People who are infected experience cramps, nausea, fever, and vomiting. The “signature symptom,” though, according to Stanford’s David Relman, is “copious, watery diarrhea.” This can lead to dehydration, kidney damage, and hospitalization; some patients experience an up to a 10 percent loss in body weight.
In the US, cyclosporiasis outbreaks often start because of poor sanitation on farms or in food processing, especially when farmers “refuse to provide adequate toilet or handwashing facilities for their workers,” according to Ryan Cooper at The Prospect. When feces containing disease spores get on vegetables and fruits, people ingest it and become sick. It is very difficult to wash off the parasites; the only surefire way to get rid of them is to cook produce to 158˚F.
Symptoms of cyclosporiasis take a week to develop. That makes tracing outbreaks difficult since it requires lengthy interviews with all those affected. Local and state health departments do not always have the resources for such interviews, which is where the federal government is supposed to come in.
But unfortunately, Trump and RFK Jr. have spent a year and a half doing everything they can to destroy federal capacity.
Again, RFK Jr. and Trump removed cyclosporiasis from the FoodNet mandatory food surveillance program. In the past, FoodNet would be testing for cyclosporiasis and monitoring cases on an ongoing basis in order to find and contain outbreaks early. But now, former FoodNet epidemiologist Jodie Guest told the BBC, “we don’t have the data we normally expect to go back to use to help us … you’re starting in the dark.”
But this is just a part of Trump and RFK’s brave, lonely fight to spread explosive diarrhea from coast to coast.
In February, just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, the administration eliminated the 38-year-old USDA National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which was developing advice on foodborne illness outbreaks. It also cut 20,000 workers from the FDA and 913 from its Food Safety Inspection Service. The CDC lost 3,000 workers in a chaotic and confusing process. One former CDC official said afterwards that “now, there’s nobody to answer the phone.”
It’s impossible to know for certain whether having someone to answer the phone or conduct mandatory testing for cyclosporiasis could have prevented our current ongoing explosive disaster. Maybe it’s an extraordinary coincidence that the government gutted its capacity to monitor and prevent foodborne illness, and then a year later the US experienced a titanic cyclosporiasis outbreak. But probably not.
We still don’t know the exact scale of the illness, nor how many people will end up being affected. But it is already the largest outbreak in 20 years. In 1996, 1,500 people contracted cyclosporiasis from Guatemalan raspberries, and in 2018, around 2,400 people in the US and Canada became ill from contamination of Mexican basil. This year, the CDC has already confirmed 1,600 cases and is investigating almost 7,000.
Trump is a disease vector
Explosive diarrhea is a dramatic consequence of Trump’s hatred of public health. It’s not the first consequence, though, nor the worst.
Researchers estimate that Trump’s attack on health infrastructure and capacity led to 461,000 excess deaths in the US in his first term before the covid pandemic. His poor public health response during the pandemic cost the US at least 57,800 additional lives according to one comparative analysis with Europe.
In his second term, Trump has gone even further to wreck the nation’s capacity to respond to disease — most directly by appointing ignorant and malevolent anti-vax ghoul RFK Jr. to head HHS. The Orwellian “Make America Healthy Again” agenda is dedicated to the precise opposite — and in its goal of making the US sicker, it already has a list of accomplishment to its credit.
There is currently a dangerous global measles surge that’s hitting America especially hard because of increased vaccine hesitancy being promoted by Kennedy and the hacks he keeps installing at the CDC.
Kennedy claims he’s doing a good job of containing the measles outbreak, but that’s nonsense. He has spent years of his life attacking measles vaccines; his personal anti-vaccine interventions helped create conditions for a horrific outbreak in Samoa in 2019 in which 83 children died. True to form, in response to our current crisis, he’s dragged his feet in promoting the measles vaccine even after children in the US died. He’s also spread dangerous misinformation to scare people about vaccine safety.
As with diarrhea, it is difficult to make causal claims with absolute certainty. But when the top health official in the country is one of the greatest advocates for measles in the world, and you have a hideous historic measles outbreak, it seems reasonable to suggest there might be a link.
Along similar lines, the US cut funding to study hantavirus, a disease which led to three deaths and many more illnesses on a cruise ship this May. We would be in a better position to manage such outbreaks if Trump was not laser focused on eliminating our ability to do so.
Other Trump officials have, apparently, been envious of Kennedy’s success in spreading sickness and misery, and have tried to show Trump that they too are on the side of pathogens. Defense secretary and murderous clown Pete Hegseth burbled about religious freedom and bodily autonomy and ended a mandatory military vaccine policy on April 21. Flu vaccine uptake cratered as 60 percent of Air Force trainees opted out of the shot.
The result was a predictable disaster. At Lackland Air Force Base where service members eat at large tables and sleep together in bunk beds, the flu ripped through the ranks; 160 people fell ill in less than two months. Hegseth had to take a break from preening for cameras to order emergency vaccinations. One trainee died.
The most horrific attack on public health in Trump’s second term, however, has been aimed overseas. Elon Musk’s gutting of USAID created an explosion in HIV, disease, and malnutrition; experts estimate that more than 762,000 people have already died, including more than 500,000 children. Trump cuts also delayed detection of an ebola outbreak which has killed 700 people. So far, the risk to Americans is low, but the growing crisis demonstrates how Trump’s attack on global health infrastructure puts everyone, including Americans, at risk.
Covid, flu, measles, cyclosporiasis — if it is a disease, Trump and his hench-vectors want to see it flourish and spread through the land, sowing death and nausea.
The regime longs for an America in which government is too small and hobbled to help as the public grows weaker and sicker and more alienated from the solidarity and public action which could provide us all with a better life. Trump and Kennedy and Hegseth are grotesque cranks who hate us, and they should be removed from power immediately. It shouldn’t take explosive diarrhea for anyone to figure that out.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Remember: in his first term, the entire country ran out of toilet paper. So the nation suffering from explosive diarrhea seems like a fitting coda for this disastrous administration. What the hell were Americans thinking when they voted for him?
A shit show… how perfectly fitting. 🤦🏼♀️