The uncomfortable reasons human waste keeps turning up in your lettuce

美国严重寄生虫爆发,生菜竟是元凶?

Apple News In Conversation

2026-08-14

35 分钟
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This summer, the U.S. saw its largest cyclospora outbreak on record — with more than 22,000 suspected cases linked to contaminated iceberg lettuce, alongside a wave of other foodborne illnesses. Timothy D. Lytton, a law professor at Georgia State University and author of Outbreak: Foodborne Illness and the Struggle for Food Safety, joins Apple News In Conversation host David Greene to explain how America’s food-safety system actually works, how the system evolved, and what recent outbreaks reveal about the changes needed to make us all safer.
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  • This is In Conversation from Apple News.

  • I'm David Greene, in for Shumita Basu.

  • Today, what a summer of food-borne illness reveals about food safety in the US.

  • This summer, Americans were hit with the worst outbreak of Cyclospora on record.

  • The CDC suspects that more than 22,000 people in 15 states

  • have been sickened by the parasitic infection,

  • which has been linked to contaminated iceberg lettuce imported from Mexico.

  • But it's not the only outbreak of a food-borne illness this season.

  • In the past two months, there have been multiple Salmonella outbreaks,

  • including one tied to eggs and another to jalapeños, that have sickened over 400 people.

  • And there have been smaller outbreaks of E. coli linked to frozen berries

  • and Listeria tied to soft cheese.

  • You need to be generally aware of the fact that whenever you eat something,

  • there's a risk involved in that.

  • And I think people are surprised by this in part because it's such an intimate thing.

  • That is Timothy Lytton.

  • He's a law professor at Georgia State University and the author of Outbreak:

  • Food-borne Illness and the Struggle for Food Safety.

  • The place where you feel most insulated from the world—

  • your own home, where you're making your own meals and you're sitting down to family dinner—