Ep 216 Cyclospora: Explosive Diarrhea Everywhere

You’ve seen the headlines: a food-borne parasite is infecting people across the US, leaving them chained to the toilet sometimes for weeks on end, as they are ravaged by wave after wave of gastrointestinal upset. What the heck is cyclosporiasis and where did it come from? How scared should we be of our raspberries or lettuce or cilantro? To dish out the answers as fast we could, we put together this fact-filled episode about the biology of Cyclospora cayetanensis, how this parasite makes you sick, when we first learned about it (more recently than you might think), and what we know about this current outbreak (or outbreaks). We also probe how recent changes to foodborne pathogen surveillance on a national scale are contributing to the challenges in understanding the scope and origin of outbreaks such as this. You don’t want to miss this one!

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