Taco Bell said on Tuesday it had voluntarily and temporarily removed limited ingredients at select restaurants while health officials investigated whether customer illnesses were tied to the Taco Bell parasite outbreak. The company said officials had not confirmed any link to its restaurants or to any specific ingredient, supplier, restaurant or retailer.
The move came as Michigan said on July 13 that current results pointed to lettuce or salad greens as a possible source of the outbreak, while other food items could not be ruled out. The state said it had some 2,600 cases. For people trying to judge what is safe to eat, that uncertainty is the point: no one has identified the source yet, and no recall has been issued.
Cyclosporiasis, the illness at the center of the investigation, is caused by the cyclospora parasite and can bring long-lasting bouts of explosive diarrhea that lead to severe dehydration. Public health officials had not yet pinned down the source, even as federal and local health officials looked into whether illnesses reported by some customers were part of the broader outbreak. That left consumers with a narrow answer and an immediate problem — the food item linked to the cases was still unknown, but the risk was already spreading through the supply chain conversation.
Dr. Celine Gounder said people should treat the risk the way they would when traveling in places where food safety is less certain: do not eat fresh produce that is not cooked and cannot be peeled. She also warned that consumers cannot solve this one themselves. Dr. Nuwan Gunawardhana said investigators could not blame a certain farm or processing company until the culprit is found, which is why Michigan’s warning stopped short of naming a producer or retailer even as speculation spread online.
The timing matters because the outbreak came about one year after the CDC scaled back monitoring of cyclospora. Before July 2025, the CDC required cyclosporiasis to be reported through FoodNet, which tracked laboratory-confirmed infections. Now the burden is on investigators to identify the source without the same level of routine reporting, and on restaurants to act cautiously before a recall or confirmed link exists. Until that culprit is identified, the clearest public advice is to avoid uncooked produce that cannot be peeled and to wait for the investigation to land on a specific source.
