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By Shane Croucher

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The first illnesses began on May 13. Federal investigators identified a single supplier on July 16.

In the two months between, contaminated iceberg lettuce moved through a national distribution system and was eaten by thousands of unwitting Americans, in what is now the largest cyclospora season on record.

The pace and scale of the spread of the microscopic parasite and the awful symptoms it brings about—especially explosive diarrhea—have created a health emergency that officials are scrambling to contain.

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This is a natural outbreak, but hints at a disturbing new era dawning with rapid advances in artificial intelligence-led biotechnology. The nightmare scenario is the release—accidental or deliberate—of pathogens becoming a perennial and deadly disruption to our lives.

Nobody engineered this parasite or released it deliberately. It still took two months to find.

Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University's School of Public Health, co-leads the Global Health Security Index.

Artificial intelligence changes the arithmetic of biological risk, she told Newsweek, by making "everything harder and more urgent." If the U.S. is "barely treading water right now," AI could be "the lead weights on our feet that drag us down."

Her fear is a pathogen built to defeat the instruments modern medicine relies on, "a biological agent that evades the protections that we have," she said, referring to diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.

And the threat may no longer come only from sophisticated state programs, because AI "lowers the bar for places that don't have that kind of deep expertise." Her verdict on American readiness runs to four stark words: "We are incredibly vulnerable."

In February, a bipartisan working group convened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)—endorsed by more than 40 signatories, among them Major General Paul Friedrichs, the inaugural director of the White House pandemic preparedness office—concluded that "Americans face greater risks from biological threats today than at any time this century."

Advancing AI and cheap computing are making bioweapons easier to develop, it found, while American defenses move the other way.

The 2026 budget request cut biodefense funding by more than 11 percent, the intelligence community's biological threat unit was eliminated, and BioWatch, the national environmental detection system, was last updated in 2011.

In the U.S., "biopreparedness is regressing," the CSIS report warned.

A White House official told Newsweek in a statement that "National Security Council, Homeland Security Council, and Domestic Policy Councils are together handling pandemic preparedness functions to fully account for the global and domestic needs in close partnership with the agencies, including the Departments of Health and Human Services, State, and War."

"There are staff on the NSC and HSC who are focused on biosecurity and biodefense," they added.

Stress Test

Cyclospora tests the current machinery, and the results are not entirely reassuring.

By July 24, the CDC had tied 1,947 laboratory-confirmed illnesses in nine states to iceberg lettuce from central Mexico supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico.

Nationally there are now 6,707 confirmed cases since May 1, more than 11,500 awaiting confirmation and 423 hospitalizations across 45 states.

Confirming a patient belongs to a cyclospora outbreak can take six weeks. Whole-genome sequencing, which links bacterial cases quickly, does not exist for this particular parasite.

In July 2025, the government cut FoodNet's mandatory reporting list from eight pathogens to two, making cyclospora surveillance optional.

Were a deadly pathogen to enter the food supply, Nuzzo said, it would be very hard to figure out the source in time to stop people eating it—a poor signal, she added, to send adversaries weighing agro-terrorism or economic warfare.

She pointed to cuts in active surveillance and "a decimation of personnel and experience and leadership at CDC," leaving essentially one state health department, Michigan, to carry "the boots-on-the-ground work" for a national investigation.

There is precedent for the ambiguity.

When followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh contaminated salad bars at 10 Oregon restaurants with salmonella in 1984—sickening 751 people, the largest bioterrorist attack in American history—investigators first blamed restaurant hygiene.

The deliberate cause only emerged a year later, through a criminal investigation rather than disease surveillance.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said July 21 the federal government had the cyclospora outbreak "under control”, and called criticism of the FoodNet cuts "invalid”. Only "redundant surveillance" was cut at FoodNet, he said.

At a July 16 George Washington University briefing, CSPI's Sarah Sorscher said the FoodNet cuts did not cause this outbreak, but called them a symptom of response programs running out of money.

Taylor Farms says no product test had confirmed the parasite as of July 24 and that it suspended central Mexico production. It has also said it spends more than $200 million a year on audited safety protocols.

Measles Is the Canary

Nuzzo says there’s a better rolling outbreak than cyclospora that puts American vulnerabilities on display: measles.

"Is the United States ready for a deadly biological attack? I would say no," she said. "Look at the ongoing transmission of measles; that tells us all we need to know."

By July 23, the CDC had confirmed 2,318 measles cases this year—more than the 2,289 recorded across all of 2025, and the highest annual count since 1991. Measles had been eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.

Kindergarten coverage for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine slipped from 95.2 percent in 2019-20 to 92.5 percent in 2024-25.

"We should not be having measles spreading in the United States," Nuzzo said, calling the disease "the canary that senses that something is deeply off."

Measles exercises what an engineered outbreak would demand: spotting transmission, communicating under pressure, countering misinformation, persuading people to use a protection—the vaccine—that already works.

Nuzzo blames Kennedy, who has long-running ties to vaccine skeptics, and who has sought to restructure the childhood vaccine schedule while in office, for eroding confidence in that protection.

Kennedy told senators in April the U.S. had done better than any other country at controlling measles, calling the outbreak "global" and saying it predated his time in office.

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The same month at a House hearing, Kennedy rejected the characterization that he opposes vaccinations.

"I'm not anti-vax. I'm pro science," he said. "What I've said is vaccines should be adequately safety tested so we know both about the risk and the benefits."

At another Senate hearing in April, Kennedy said "we promote the measles vaccine" and "the measles vaccine prevents measles in 97 percent of the people who take it, I've always said that, that's what the science says."

Recently, the White House staffed its Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) for the first time under the Trump administration, according to reports in NOTUS and Bloomberg.

It was a response to the multiple ongoing outbreaks, including measles, cyclospora, Ebola, and hantavirus.

"Public health protection is never just a single wall of protection," Nuzzo said. "It's multiple layers."

A White House official said Dr. Sara Brenner, a former top FDA official, is "on detail from HHS to lead" the OPPR "in order to assist with the White House’s response to the multiple ongoing outbreaks."

"Under this Administration, the United States continues to act faster and more comprehensively than any other country to contain the transmission of Ebola," the official said in their statement to Newsweek. "The Administration’s historic success curtailing the 2025 Ebola outbreak reflects how our system has worked and continues to work."

‘Not My Major Concern’

Kellogg Schwab, the Abel Wolman Professor in Water and Public Health at Johns Hopkins, thinks the food system—under close surveillance and with well-developed hygiene systems—is a poor choice of vehicle for a biological weapon.

In the case of cyclospora, it is a protozoan parasite, not bacteria like more familiar food safety concerns such as E. coli and Salmonella, and so multiplies only inside a host. "There will be no environmental amplification," he told Newsweek.

And designing an agent is not the same as deploying one. "It's one thing to generate it, it's another thing to distribute it," Schwab said, adding that a deliberate attack on the food system "is not my major concern."

Untreated irrigation water and industrial scale is, however. Many farms feed one plant shipping hundreds of thousands to a million pounds a week, so contamination at a single farm travels further than a local grower's could.

"It's hard to manage just the sheer volume," he said. "There are things that can slip through the system as it currently exists."

Delivering Trump’s Executive Order

On Tuesday, the administration released the U.S. Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research, fulfilling one requirement of an executive order focused on biosecurity that President Donald Trump signed in May 2025.

The order gave the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) 90 days to replace the 2024 Framework for Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening—rules meant to keep mail-order DNA from people with no legitimate use for it—and 180 days to extend screening to privately funded research.

The newly released policy arrived about eleven months past the order's deadline.

It prohibits federally funded dangerous gain-of-function research, and defines that to include work facilitating a pathogen's ability to "evade detection methodologies"—Nuzzo's scenario, named as a banned outcome.

"The federal government has a duty to protect the American people—not fund research that could put them at risk," Kennedy said in the release announcing the policy.

"Today, we are ending federal support for dangerous gain-of-function research and replacing weak oversight with clear, enforceable safeguards."

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Two other requirements remain unmet. The replacement Framework for Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening was due in August 2025. The federal government's own page on the framework still says it will be updated once it is available.

The strategy covering privately funded research, due last November per Trump’s order, appears in the new policy's first footnote as something an interagency working group will explore.

And most consequentially for Nuzzo's line of argument, the new policy does not prohibit purely computational research, including using such means to design novel forms of biological agents, unless a foreign entity of concern is involved.

Building the pathogen is covered, but designing it is not. The intersection of AI and biology gets an interagency group to monitor it.

Newsweek has contacted the OSTP press office via email for comment.

In a correspondence in Nature Biotechnology last June, 13 researchers—two of them National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientists—warned that generative models can design molecules unlike anything in existing databases, and could slip past screening that matches sequences against a list.

In his book The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman, a DeepMind co-founder who now runs Microsoft AI, recalls a professor telling a seminar how cheap DNA synthesizers had become, and how homemade work could be topped up with mail-ordered DNA.

The horrifying potential there is that someone, somewhere, with a bit of scientific knowledge, lab equipment, and the power of AI at their disposal, could cook up lethal pathogens in their garage using DNA they’d ordered to their home.

Suleyman’s summary was blunt: "The apocalypse, mail ordered."

CSIS' Proposed Fixes

The CSIS working group's proposed fixes are specific, and mostly unglamorous.

• Decommission BioWatch, untouched since 2011, and replace it with an integrated biothreat surveillance system built on wastewater monitoring, metagenomic sequencing and traveler screening
• Make the CDC the agency formally responsible for pulling federal surveillance data into a single picture
• Reestablish the intelligence unit that tracked foreign bioweapons work, and task it with annual assessments of what advancing AI and computing power are making possible
• Rebuild the investigative capacity across the FBI, CIA, ODNI, Pentagon and State Department to determine whether an outbreak was deliberate and to say who caused it—the question nobody could answer in Oregon in 1984

Two of its recommendations speak directly to the gap Washington left this week.

• Congress should require every institution subject to U.S. law, regulation or funding to buy synthetic DNA only from suppliers that screen both the sequences ordered and the customers ordering them—a statutory duty rather than a condition of grant money that lapses whenever a framework goes unwritten
• And OSTP should be required, not merely encouraged, to work with frontier AI labs on the safety practices governing where synthetic biology and machine learning meet

The group calls its package affordable, and builds it on the National Biodefense Strategy the first Trump administration published in 2018. The next step is the administration agreeing that these are the right remedies—or identifying its own—and then doing them.

What Comes Next

There is an empirical case for calm. In January 2024 RAND researchers had teams plan biological attacks with and without large language models and found no statistically significant difference in the viability of the plans.

However, they tested that era's systems, and said they had not measured how far the frontier stood from the threshold that would matter.

Three dates will test the rest. The independent review body the new policy creates is due by mid-October, and agency implementation guidance by mid-November.

On October 13, synthesis providers are meant to tighten their screening window from 200 nucleotides to 50—under a framework nobody can currently say is in force.

If those land, and if Congress passes the gene-synthesis screening bill stalled since January, the gap narrows.

Until then, the country has banned the experiment and left the blueprint.

Schwab's parting advice was not about frameworks. Ordinary farmers and food workers, given the right resources and training, are among the most underused defenses the country has against these kinds of risks.

Then he gave some timeless personal biosecurity advice: "Wash your hands."

Cyclosporiasis Outbreak

Check out Newsweek's latest coverage:

• Taylor Farms Says FDA Has Apologized Over ‘False Positive’ Cyclospora Test
• Cyclospora Patient Reveals What Symptoms are Really Like as Outbreak Spreads
• ⁠Which Salad Greens Are Safe From Cyclospora Parasite? List of Companies, Where to Buy
• What Kills Cyclospora? Food Safety Tips Amid Explosive Diarrhea Outbreaks
• Medicine To Treat ‘Explosive’ Diarrhea Outbreaks Could Cause More Diarrhea
• Cyclospora Isn’t the Only Parasite in Fresh Produce—Experts Warn of Others
• How Long Does Cyclospora Incubate? Symptoms To Watch For, How to Treat It
• Where Does Cyclospora Parasite Come From? How to Protect Yourself

Updated, 7/31/2026, 10:28 a.m. ET: This article was updated with a statement from a White House official.

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