A Muskegon woman filed a lawsuit on July 28 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, accusing Taylor Farms, Taylor Fresh Foods, Border Foods and five unknown corporations of causing a Cyclospora infection tied to lettuce.
The woman says she ate tacos with lettuce and tomatoes on July 6 at a restaurant on Colby Road in Whitehall, then developed symptoms of cyclosporiasis three days later. By July 11, she had gone to an urgent care facility in Muskegon, and a stool test later came back positive for Cyclospora cayetanensis on July 18.
The complaint puts a hard number on the damage: $32 million. It also says the illness was not routine. The woman was hospitalized on July 19, transferred to another hospital in Grand Rapids for further treatment and discharged on July 21 after what the suit describes as a severe infection that has already stretched into a longer medical fight.
Her case matters because the filing links a single sickened customer to a broader multistate Cyclospora outbreak and says her health made the infection harder to control. The lawsuit says she has diabetes, coronary artery disease, sarcoidosis, arthritis, autoimmune disease and severe anemia. It also says she is a uterine cancer survivor and immunocompromised, which kept her from taking Bactrim, the usual sulfa-based treatment for cyclosporiasis.
That detail helps explain the most troubling part of the timeline. Her symptoms reportedly eased on July 16, but the suit says her condition worsened again on July 19, leading to hospitalization. The treating physicians, according to the complaint, have advised that the illness may persist for months.
For now, the lawsuit asks for general, special, incidental and consequential damages, but it does not spell out how the lettuce was contaminated or where in the supply chain the problem began. It is also unclear from the filing whether any other plaintiffs have joined the case. What is clear is that the legal claim is now in federal court in Michigan, adding a new front to an outbreak that has already moved from illness to litigation.
