Salad greens for sale at a bodega in Astoria, New York. The number of cases of cyclosporiasis has more than doubled to over 4,173 cases across 41 states this week. (Photo by Shalina Chatlani/ Stateline)
The number of cases of cyclosporiasis — a parasitic infection linked to contaminated water or food that causes severe intestinal issues — has more than doubled to over 4,173 cases across 41 states this week, up from the 1,645 confirmed cases in 34 states reported last week by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Cyclosporiasis causes symptoms that include watery or “explosive” diarrhea, nausea and stomach cramps. The surge in cases had made 2026 the worst year for the infection on record.
The CDC estimates that there are likely more than 7,400 additional cases that have not yet been confirmed. No deaths have been reported, but 308 people have been hospitalized, more than double the 141 hospitalizations reported last week.
State and federal officials suspect there are multiple sources of the outbreak, but they had reported that the cases in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia were connected to shredded iceberg lettuce grown in central Mexico and sold by Taylor Farms. On Monday, however, federal officials said tests making the connection were a false positive.
Michigan, the first state to report an outbreak, reported 7,171 cases and 102 hospitalizations as of July 16. Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Indiana also have seen high case counts, alongside New York City.
The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, which represents public health agencies across the country, said labs have a hard time tracking case connections because cyclospora is a parasitic genome that is more complex than the bacterial pathogens that cause other foodborne illnesses. As a result, state and local heath investigators must resort to reviewing restaurant and grocery receipts, menus and supply chain records, according to the organization.
“Case interviews and traceback investigations are often time intensive, creating a burden on state and local public health infrastructure,” senior analyst Heather Tomlinson and environmental health director Courtney Anderson wrote.
North Carolina had confirmed more than 560 cyclosporiasis cases as of July 20. Dr. Carl Williams, state public health veterinarian for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, told reporters on Tuesday that the state has relied heavily on its 86 local health departments to track cases.
Williams said twice weekly calls with the CDC also have been helpful.
“The CDC has been very responsive to us and the other states,” Williams said during the briefing. “But as you can imagine, I mean, it’s a lot to go through.”
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Aidan Muse of Twin Lakes bagged his first banjo-playing title at the East Troy Bluegrass Festival. Dolly Parton’s banjo player, Gary "Biscuit" Davis discovered Muse there and took him under his wing.
Attorneys say cases that claim the popular weedkiller causes cancer will have to change course to move forward in court after the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the agriculture company last month.
For Montgomery, Rib Mountain’s appeal goes beyond its height. Its preserved ripple marks and views across the surrounding landscape offer a rare chance to contemplate the immense span of geological time.
The Lake Pepin 3-Speed Tour is a way for cyclists to explore the food, drink and views along the Mississippi River — while reconnecting with old friends and an old way of life.
At Green Bay Fringe, touring acts and local artists take part in a four-day extravaganza of quirky, off-the-wall stage performances. The festival returns for its third year July 16-19.
When Winneconne was left off the state highway map, the village seceded from Wisconsin. The stunt made national news and is still celebrated at the annual Sovereign State Days.
A large-scale art installation, “Zig and Zag,” will transform the facade of the Racine Art Museum with colorful fabric. Led by a New York artist, volunteer sewists from Racine will use donated materials to bring this community fabric project to life.
Property owners are suing the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa for allegedly restricting their access to a boat launch on private property.
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RENO, Nev. – Transportation leaders from six school districts across the U.S. shared their team-building secrets in an STN EXPO West panel on Monday.
CEO Antonio Civitella explained how Transfinder administered the fourth annual Top Transportation Teams award program by surveying participating districts’ employees and praised the “exceptional” winners amidst progressively toughening competition.
“These are people who put their people before their processes,” he declared, while moderating the discussion.
A school district does not have to be using Transfinder technology to participate in the Top Transportation Teams program, which entails completing a survey on organizational culture.
This year’s winning districts with under 100 staff members include Franklin Square Union Free School District and Pembroke Central School District in New York, plus Wa-Nee Community Schools in Indiana. Franklin Square UFSD also secured the highest overall rating and highest employee participation rate.
Winning districts with over 100 staff members include Franklin Township Community School Corporation in Indiana, Hoover City Schools in Alabama and Rockwall Independent School District in Texas.
Five out of the six districts are two- or three-time award winners.
Family-Oriented Operations
“Family is everything to Rockwall ISD,” declared Director of Transportation Jennifer Gardella, who was the solo first-time winner.
The concept is so important at two-time consecutive winner Hoover City Schools that Director of Transportation Brad Hayn said he has one team member dedicated to alerting him when someone needs extra attention.
Todd Livesay, director of transportation for Franklin Township, pointed out the toughness of the pupil transportation job but noted that both drivers and students should be given grace since people are imperfect.
Matt Hostetter, transportation and school safety clerk for Wa-Nee, a three-time consecutive winner, shared that group sports games, breakfasts, overnight trips and birthday recognitions help foster closeness in the small district.
“We do lunch [together] every day, we drive each other’s kids, our community just has our back,” concurred Amy Zimmerman, 19A trainer and school bus driver for Pembroke CSD.
Gregg Fox, director of transportation for Franklin Square UFSD, noted that small districts have challenges too, like gossip spiraling out of control or toxic employees quickly poisoning the well. Civitella noted that such employees should not make up more than 10 percent of an organization. Hayn and Livesay added that consistent visionary leadership helps prevent these issues.
Gardella said that showing kindness, leading by excellence and anonymous surveys led to more open communication.
Showing Up & Being Present
Hayn and Livesay shared that asking staff how they are doing usually prompts cathartic conversations on personal issues rather than work ones. Even with over 190 team members, Hayn said he tries to have monthly individual meetings with each one.
These are interactions a leader can’t get while sitting at their desk, Civitella emphasized. Even basics like eye control during conversations are crucial for leaders, he added.
“Some of you might want to drive the bus to avoid some of these conflicts, I get it, but also there’s a benefit of driving a bus because you’re willing to do anything they’re going to do,” he said.
Hostetter confirmed that starting as a bus driver gave him credibility and better relationships with staff when he moved into a leadership position.
“I purposely make myself present,” said Fox, who drives a bus due to the driver shortage but also set up his office phone and email to come to his cellphone so he can spend more time in the drivers’ room.
Meanwhile, Gardella hosts a coffee and snack hour, where staff are allowed to come to her with questions and concerns but also solutions.
Panelists agreed that team lunches, pizza parties and themed celebrations assist with connection.
When Hostetter had cancer surgery earlier this year, he realized he was not alone through an outpouring of best wishes and cards from his staff. Zimmerman, likewise, shared that her staff supportively showed up when her father died and when another driver was diagnosed with cancer.
Hardships create even more connection opportunities that make a transportation team truly like family, Civitella said. “It’s not just those cool leadership terms that everyone’s using and throwing around, it’s got to be personal,” he added.
Word of mouth in the small, tight-knit area around Franklin Square UFSD has gotten retired police officers to come drive a bus, Fox added, which assists with the driver shortage and wage competition.
“I think sometimes as directors, we need to forget about all our problems, and we need to remember that’s a human being who has problems, too,” Hayn advised.
He related the story of a reliable driver, who he sent home to care for her ailing mother and gave extra time off after the mother’s death despite his driver shortage.
While he worried about coverage as drivers missed work due to personal issues, Livesay said that his staff gave grace and rallied around drivers undergoing tough situations at home, creating a cycle of altruism.
“All of our transportation coordinators, every trainer, every mechanic, everybody we had stepped up every day to make sure that we got those kids to school, and we really had no problem getting them home too,” he related. “So, all the worry that I had in my mind was just ridiculous because they are completely selfless.”
Wrapping Up
“It’s not about you, it’s about the team,” Fox underscored. “You’re there to steer the ship but you don’t want to be overbearing while you do it.”
He and Zimmerman agreed that it’s important to not micromanage but let staff take ownership of certain projects.
Livesay counseled transportation directors to have intentional conversations with their drivers, who will in turn spread their resulting positive feelings among their peers.
“Find yourself a mentor,” advised Gardella. She said hers is Teri Mapengo, director of transportation for Prosper Independent School District in Texas, which won a Top Transportation Teams award last year.
“Don’t outgrow the basics” of interacting with team members as humans, Civitella concluded.
New federal rules for dicamba aim to help cotton and soybean farmers control weeds. But the herbicide, which can kill other crops and trees, remains controversial.
A sign noting the acceptance of electronic benefit transfer cards for food aid is displayed at a grocery store in California. Upcoming shifts in the federal food stamp program are poised to cost states billions of dollars, raising fears that more Americans will lose access to the nation’s largest food assistance program.
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Upcoming funding shifts in the federal food stamp program are poised to cost states billions of dollars, heightening fears that more Americans will lose access to the nation’s largest food assistance program.
Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act made major changes to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, including new eligibility and work requirements. Already, more than 4 million Americans have lost SNAP benefits, putting more pressure on food banks and food pantries across the country.
But beginning in fall 2027, states for the first time must begin to fund some SNAP benefits themselves. Analyses of newly released data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show states could be on the hook for more than $9 billion. Some states, county officials and advocates fear this will remove more Americans from the safety net program and even push some states to consider dropping out of SNAP altogether.
The new law will penalize states depending on their payment error rates — a technical calculation by the feds of SNAP overpayments and underpayments, not fraud. States with a payment error rate above 6% will have to fund 5% to 15% of their benefit payments. Previously, the feds provided the aid.
In USDA’s most recent analysis, the error rate slightly improved across the states in fiscal year 2025, but officials said states still made a collective $10.1 billion in improper payments.
“These payment error rates are further proof that state accountability is severely lacking in SNAP,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a June news release.
As many as 36 states will face new cost share requirements in the fall of 2027. And nearly half of those are expected to be on the hook for $100 million or more a year, according to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
For example, in Michigan, the current error rate could cost the state $300 million a year, the center estimates. Texas could be on the hook for an estimated $725 million and New York may need to spend more than $1 billion.
“States are going to have to make some really painful decisions as they have to balance their budgets about how they are going to cover those costs, and if they can’t fully cover the required cost-sharing requirement, by raising revenue or cutting elsewhere in their budget,” said Katie Bergh, senior policy analyst at the center.
The change is heightening fears that states will slow down benefit approval, cut access or even choose to drop out of the program altogether, Bergh said. While advocates and some officials have unsuccessfully pushed Congress to reverse its SNAP changes, many are now asking for at least a delay in implementation to give states time to improve their payment error rates.
After USDA released its new data last month, New Jersey Human Services Commissioner Stephen Cha said the error rate measurement is “fundamentally flawed.” Though the state significantly cut its error rate from 14.33% to 6.86%, it could still be on the hook for an estimated $100 million.
Cha reiterated previous calls for Congress and the Trump administration to eliminate or delay the changes.
“Penalizing states will do nothing to improve payment accuracy or meaningfully address waste, fraud, or abuse,” Cha said in a statement. “Instead, they impose a significant financial and administrative burden on State and county governments, threatening our ability to effectively administer SNAP and meet the critical needs of families across New Jersey.”
In a statement to Stateline, a USDA spokesperson noted states have had decades to improve erroneous payments. “Perhaps now, States will stop spending other people’s money so recklessly,” the statement said.
Looming budget pressures
In 10 states — California, Colorado, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin — counties administer the SNAP program.
The National Association of Counties has said the cost shift will threaten not only food access, but could squeeze the ability of counties to fund public safety, emergency management and infrastructure needs.
“These cost shifts threaten to destabilize county budgets, forcing reductions in staffing and delaying critical nutrition assistance for vulnerable residents,” association CEO Matthew Chase said in a letter last year to congressional leaders.
The National Conference of State Legislatures, which represents lawmakers and legislative staff, said states are committed to administering SNAP benefits accurately and to being held accountable for their performance. But in a statement, the organization said USDA’s most recent data “make clear that additional time is needed” to implement meaningful improvements.
State efforts to improve their payment accuracy also have substantial tradeoffs.
This spring, the Urban Institute and the American Public Human Services Association surveyed all SNAP agencies across the country. Thirty-nine states responded to the survey, representing a 78% response rate.
The survey found that SNAP administrators are investing in staffing, technology and automation to respond to the federal law. But many states are turning away from efforts to improve timeliness and may have to reduce staffing and benefits to comply.
In the survey, 29% of states identified narrowing eligibility policies as a potential risk and 11% saw a wholesale withdrawal from SNAP as a potential risk.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, said churches, food banks and other organizations would ensure that people are fed there.
Stitt, the chair of the bipartisan National Governors Association, said he believes federal programs like SNAP are operated with “a lot of fraud and abuse.” He also suggested that the program had become too seamless, with cards that resemble credit cards allowing recipients to easily purchase groceries.
“Maybe it’s going back to the day where there was a little stigma attached and you had to actually go to a food bank and pick up commodity cheese and commodity groceries, and it had a little stigma so you were a little bit embarrassed,” he told Stateline. “Maybe we should go back to a little bit of that instead of just making it so easy…”
“Nobody’s going to go hungry in Oklahoma,” he said. “…I can assure you people were eating, getting married, graduating from high school before we even had anything called SNAP benefits.”
The error rate
The federal focus on error rates is incentivizing states to slow down or entirely halt benefits in some cases, said Gina Plata-Nino, SNAP director at the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit working to combat hunger.
That’s because states face no penalty for wrongfully denying benefits, she said, only for paying too much or too little in benefits. The rate, calculated by a random sample of households, adds the number of overpayments and underpayments together. And states can still be penalized for overpayments they later recover from recipients.
“There is no oversight in terms of the people who are eligible and being cut off,” Plata-Nino said.
In Massachusetts, nearly 175,000 people lost SNAP benefits between July of last year and May of this year. And understaffing at the Department of Transitional Assistance has caused thousands of incoming phone calls from residents to get disconnected, according to the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, a poverty law and policy center.
That organization has pushed for more caseworkers, though a legislative budget proposal last week would cut $26 million from existing operations, said Victoria Negus, senior economic justice advocate at the institute.
“What is happening is a version of what I’ve been calling ‘can’t see the forest for the payment error rate trees,’” she said. “They have set up this system that forces states to try to meet a number that is almost impossible for them to meet without fully decimated access to SNAP, because it takes time to methodically and carefully reduce payment error rates.”
In Alabama, officials said the state continues to prioritize staff training, automation and other changes to reduce the state’s error rate. The current error rate of 9.52% could cost the state an estimated $170 million.
Alabama’s legislature has set aside nearly $150 million for the SNAP program. But state Sen. Greg Albritton, a Republican who leads the budget committee, told the Alabama Reflector in April that those funds won’t be released unless the state can reduce its error rate to 6% or develop another plan to cover costs of the federal cuts.
Kathryn Shoupe, spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Human Resources, noted that the federal data can be over a year old. She also noted that it isn’t evidence of fraud, but usually unintentional reporting errors from recipients.
LaTrell Clifford Wood, the hunger policy advocate at the anti-poverty nonprofit Alabama Arise, said the state needs hundreds more employees to fully meet the need. She noted that more than 52,000 people have already lost SNAP benefits in Alabama. And with rising grocery prices, she said the focus on the error rate will force difficult budgetary decisions that could affect other parts of the state budget, such as education.
“It is a metric with moral ambiguity,” she said. “We are putting paper pushing over people.”
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Event organizer Martinez Melgar said while participating teams tend to be from the Midwest, some come from as far as California. The thing, he said, that connects them all, is their shared roots in Oaxaca, Mexico.
From July 20 through Aug. 1, audiences in the Appleton area have a unique opportunity to be immersed in classical music as an up-close experience, and perhaps a personal discovery.
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