For weeks, Sherry Dommer has been living a gastrointestinal nightmare.
Violent cramps. Exhaustion. Unrelenting nausea. Sprints to the toilet at all hours of the night.
Ms. Dommer, 49, has long considered herself a “go-go-go person,” but certainly not in this sense. The illness, which also struck her son, has felt like a pox on their house, its origins a mystery that has only unraveled in recent days.
The suspected culprit? A Crunchy Taco Supreme.
Ms. Dommer is one of thousands of people across the Midwest afflicted with extreme stomach distress that authorities have tied to a parasite lurking on shredded lettuce served on tacos, burritos and other Taco Bell creations.
The cyclospora parasite has wreaked havoc through intestines across broad swaths of the country, but has been especially rampant in Monroe County, Mich., which has reported one of the highest rates of infection in the nation.
Here, the debilitating — and at times embarrassing — malady has gripped the county, filled pharmacies, and diverted attention from local data center controversies and the impact of a recent bad storm. Today’s town chatter centers on the humbling concerns playing out in tile-floored household sanctuaries and public bathroom stalls.
The nasty symptoms have led to plenty of jokes, but the infection has resulted in serious consequences, including hundreds of hospitalizations.
“It feels like someone took a baseball bat to your abdomen,” said Nathan Gaynier, a Monroe County tooling engineer who had waves of symptoms over 10 days. A pregnant court reporter in a neighboring county told The New York Times she had spent six days in the hospital and feared for the life of her unborn child. Nicole Goodman, a 44-year-old nurse, said she had to wear a diaper to work — even after doctors had her on an antibiotic treatment.
“It was something I’ve never experienced or seen with my patients before,” Ms. Goodman said.
All of these people told The Times they had eaten in recent weeks at Taco Bell.
The company said it has removed the affected lettuce from its restaurants and that customers “can safely enjoy their favorites” at Taco Bells nationwide. The problems, a company spokesperson said, were an “industry-wide issue, not a Taco Bell-specific issue.”
Federal officials have said an outbreak in five states, including Michigan, has been linked to iceberg lettuce that was grown and shredded in Mexico and supplied to Taco Bell by Taylor Farms, a California-based produce giant.
But the national scope is much broader: Taylor Farms said on Friday that it was recalling iceberg lettuce sent to 27 states. And while many in Monroe suspect that they were sickened by lettuce at Taco Bell, they cannot be sure.
The F.D.A. said that other restaurants and stores might be implicated as health officials continued their investigation.
If anyone felt safe from a parasite linked to fast food tacos, it might have been Sherry Dommer.
She grows lettuce in the backyard of her home, which sits along a gravel road outside a village called Maybee. She tends two beehives for honey, uses eggs from her Pekin ducks, and has apple, pear and peach trees on the property, not far from her husband’s two marijuana plants. She’s not sure if DoorDash delivers to her house, though if it does, the food would probably be cold by the time it arrived.
But one day last month, she took her 17-year-old son into Monroe for a haircut. And he wanted Taco Bell.
A Crunchy Taco Supreme and a few days later, she began to feel nauseous. Then her body started revolting.
“There was no time to get out of the shower sometimes,” she said with a grimace, standing beside an assortment of herbs and an essential oil diffuser blowing a pleasant steam into her kitchen.
Ms. Dommer said she eventually went to an urgent care, where a doctor asked her to return with a stool sample. She shared with The Times evidence of her communications with the local health department, as well as her Taco Bell purchase.
As case numbers increase, labs are racing to keep up with a flood of samples.
ProMedica, a regional hospital and medical care group, has its technicians working 24/7 to get through a stubborn backlog of about 550 samples that continue to pile up. Techs in its Toledo, Ohio, lab on Friday pipetted stool sample after stool sample into machines that scanned for the parasite.
“That was positive,” said Robin Fink, a 31-year-old lab employee, handing a sample to a colleague.
Ms. Fink worked quickly with gloved hands as she processed each specimen, discarding waste into biohazard containers and inserting cartridges into a beeping and whirring testing instrument that resembles a small wall of safe deposit boxes.
Dr. Brian Kaminski, the vice president of medical affairs for ProMedica, said samples were testing positive at an alarmingly high rate of 60 percent.
That rate and the rapid increase in cases made Dr. Kaminski realize late last month that the region “had to be either the epicenter or the center” of exposure, he said. As a precaution, he took several tubs of mixed greens out of his own family’s fridge and tossed them into the trash.
Abigail LaMonde, a court reporter in a county next to Monroe, said she had been throwing up as many as 20 times in a few-hour period last week.
“It’s explosive diarrhea; you can’t not laugh at that,” she said in an interview. “But this also can be incredibly serious.”
The illness became so bad for Ms. LaMonde, who is 12 weeks pregnant, that she feared she might lose her baby. She said doctors had warned against prescribing her the standard treatment, Bactrim, because of her pregnancy.
When her husband came home on a Friday afternoon this month, he found her passed out on the bathroom floor. He rushed her to the emergency room with their 4-year-old daughter in tow.
Ms. LaMonde said she had lost pregnancies in the past and worried about the infection’s effect on her baby. She said on Saturday that she hadn’t been able to eat solid food since getting sick on July 9.
As the impact of the outbreak continues to evolve across the nation, life in Monroe plods along, albeit awkwardly at the city’s five Taco Bell locations.
At the restaurant along Telegraph Road where Ms. Dommer said she ate before falling ill, the parking lot was nearly empty at points this past week. In one instance, the lone customer parked there was a woman running to Panera Bread next door.
Still, at the right hour, cars lined up in the drive-through as workers filled soda cups and stacked orders of tacos inside.
Late Friday night, a young Taco Bell employee offered each customer a terse warning through the intercom.
The tacos would come without lettuce, at this time.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
The post Misery in the Epicenter of Cyclospora: ‘A Baseball Bat to Your Abdomen’ appeared first on New York Times.
