It was a hacky joke for years: eat Taco Bell, get diarrhea. If that was actually happening to anyone, it probably said more about their constitution than about the food. But nowadays, real life has a funny habit of turning old punchlines into headlines.
According to The Washington Post, federal and state health officials are investigating whether Taco Bell may be connected to a massive outbreak of Cyclospora, a parasite that causes days of watery, explosive diarrhea. The beef and the greediness have nothing to do with it. The fault may lie in the veggies adorning your taco.
Before you swear off your Crunchwraps and Cheesy Gordita Crunches forever, know that the investigators have not 100 percent confirmed that Taco Bell is the source. Some of the people who got sick reported eating Taco Bell beforehand, but many, many others said they never even touched the stuff. Out of an abundance of caution, Taco Bell has voluntarily removed lettuce, cilantro, onions, pico de gallo, and guacamole from some Michigan-area locations as investigators trace the source.
Michigan is one of the hardest-hit states so far, and one of the earliest. It’s now spread across the country, with the weeks-long reporting delay likely to keep the numbers steadily rising. Current numbers have over 4,000 people across the country, hunched over the toilet, praying for it all to be over. Health officials suspect leafy greens, but with the CDC a husk of its former self after being gutted, they haven’t gotten any more specific than that, with no particular grower, supplier, or even type of leafy green to pin it on.
Taco Bell’s Possible Link to the Nationwide Cyclospora Outbreak: Everything We Know
Cyclospora is an especially difficult parasite to track, since symptoms can take days to appear. You might be feeling fine tonight and even tomorrow, but that parasite-ridden salad you had a few days ago might still be priming the pump. It doesn’t help that this particular parasite lacks the rapid genetic tracing tools used for more common bacterial outbreaks.
While the infrastructure we once had for detecting, identifying, and slowing the spread of such outbreaks has been severely weakened in the past couple of years, you’re going to have to take matters into your own hands a little bit more than usual. Luckily, the best thing you can do right now, according to health officials, is avoid leafy greens and fresh produce for a while.
Washing them would only get rid of some of the parasites unless you wanted to so thoroughly cook your iceberg lettuce that it’s reduced to cinders.
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