All the Questions—and Explosive Answers—You Could Have About Diarrhea Summer - The Ringer

Right now, if you type the phrase “will this salad” into the Google search bar, Google will attempt to autofill the rest of the vegetal prompt with: “make you poop.” It’s not a bad idea for a children's book title, and it’s a reasonable enough question for an adult to ask a computer if they’re trying to get a handle on this whole thing with “fiber,” 2026’s hottest macronutrient. But a few lines down that search bar, Google's prompts begin to tell a fuller story, a story about mounting fear and anxiety that goes far beyond the standard salad-to-pooping pipeline. In the summer of 2026, our fresh produce–yearning society isn’t just wondering whether our simple summer niçoise will make us do a no. 2. We’re wondering … whether it’ll make us do a no. 3. “Will this salad”—I whisper into the internet—“GIVE YOU DIARRHEA,” the internet screams back. Yes, it very well could. The United States is currently facing its largest-ever outbreak of cyclospora, a single-celled parasite that spreads through contaminated food and water—most commonly, via fresh produce—and infects only humans. What does it cause? Diarrhea, mostly. The now highly memed symptoms of cyclospora are, as David Relman, a professor of medicine, microbiology, and immunology at Stanford Medicine, puts it: nausea, fatigue, and “watery diarrhea like all get-out.” But the difference between the “explosive bowel movements” that have made cyclospora the internet’s new main character and, say, the results of more standard food poisoning is that the explosive symptoms of cyclospora can last upward of a month if left untreated. Those symptoms can also seem to have disappeared, only to come back for Montezuma’s mesclun revenge. It’s a sneaky little parasite, and while it’s not uncommon for the United States to experience small upticks in cyclospora infections in the summer months—when warm and rainy weather creates a more festive environment for parasites to sow their wild oocysts—this summer’s outbreak has reached record-setting numbers in a handful of states and created an anxiety-inducing awareness of where our food is coming from, the amount it’s being regulated, and how little power we have in the matter. The matter being: trying not to get this dookie disease right now.  Cyclospora entered the pop culture canon over the past few weeks as a compulsively jokable scenario: We can’t eat vegetables, soda is medicine, poop is funny—an 8-year-old must have paid an Etsy witch to fuck shit up this summer! But the developing public health story—and our collective desire to avoid getting near-constant diarrhea—has made the whole thing a little more complex. What started for me as a simple desire to understand the correlation between my compulsive need for a biweekly fibrous salad and my extreme preference to never blow up a public bathroom has pushed me to learn more and more about single-cell parasites, the current state of the CDC and FDA, and why it feels like this random billionaire farm company is suddenly gaslighting me. But I’m not obsessive—I just have diarrhea. Or I could. And you could, too. So in an effort to figure all this out, here are some explosive answers to the most frequently asked questions about the cyclospora scandal: OK, so how bad is this cyclospora outbreak on a scale of “pre-2016 before times” to “there was this global pandemic, and I’m different now”? Since 2016, the CDC has reported, on average, around 2,800 cyclospora cases annually. Then came 2026, when the CDC has confirmed 4,173 cases and is aware of 7,400 additional state-reported cases since May 1 alone. This is a huge spike, and the worst U.S. outbreak of the parasite on record. So if you’re the kind of person who frequently gets sprayed by puddles on the sidewalk or bungles your cellphone straight into a bowl of soup, you may be thinking: OK, I would definitely be one of the 4,173 people to get the pooping parasite. In that case, maybe just avoid eating lettuce or knobby berries for the remainder of the summer. Yet fewer than 12,000 people have had symptoms so bad that they've reported them to a medical professional—there’s always the option that there are people infected with cyclospora who are just pooping their way through more minor cases—which we can objectively say isn’t so many people. Cyclospora: She’s no COVID-19. Mostly because she isn’t spread person-to-person, just poop-to-produce, and she hasn’t led to any reported fatalities. So explosive diarrhea summer does have that going for it.  Breaking Down the Cyclospora Outbreak, a.k.a. the Poop Parasite