… Although cases of cyclosporiasis have reached a new high this year, the parasitic infection has spread in recent summers, too, abetted by warmer weather and higher consumption of fruits and vegetables. The cyclospora parasite reproduces in the human gut, and infected people shed the parasite in their feces. The parasite then ends up in produce typically through contaminated irrigation water. … There are no quick or easy solutions to this problem. But the most obvious place to start is on farms by cleaning up irrigation water. Even though fresh produce emerged as a significant cause of food-borne illness in the United States in the late 1990s, it remains difficult for farmers and even scientists to figure out how clean this water is or how clean it needs to be.
–Written by Timothy D. Lytton, a law professor at Georgia State University and the author of “Outbreak: Foodborne Illness and the Struggle for Food Safety.”