Joye Pate woke up Monday with a stomachache. She thought nothing of it. New York City food? Probably just a bad bite. Loose stools confirmed it was something. Then came the frequency. Hourly trips. Tuesday passed in the bathroom. By Wednesday she was frantic, Googling symptoms while eating only broth. Thursday brought a name: cyclospora.
She tested negative. But the symptoms lasted a week. She posted about it anyway. Her TikTok flooded with comments from strangers convinced they had it too. Back in June, no one knew. Now, the parasite is everywhere on social media.
“I feel like I have 99% of the symptoms.”
Meagan Rose, an influencer, posted her anxiety to over 40,000 viewers. Stress mounts when you don’t know what you know. Meanwhile, food creators are panicking. Raw veggies are out. Cooked potatoes are in. Arash Hashemi joked about steak to avoid diarrhea. The NYT Cooking account suggested stir-frying lettuce. Absurd? Maybe. But anxiety makes you do things.
Michigan officials suspect salad greens. No supplier named. No specific grower identified. Just lettuce. Maybe herbs. Perhaps raspberries, given past outbreaks. The CDC reports nearly 7,000 cases nationally. Experts guess the number is much higher. Michigan alone has 4,300 confirmed cases. Social media amplifies this. Every feed feels infected.
Diagnosis is the bottleneck. Routine stool tests skip cyclospora. Doctors look for E. coli. They check for salmonella. Cyclospora gets missed unless you ask for it specifically. Most people don’t go to a doctor for diarrhea unless it’s severe. Or bloody.
Lauren from New Jersey went to the ER. Her stool was liquid and bloody. Her blood pressure dropped. She got IV fluids. She waited on results that never came because they didn’t test for cyclospora. She had eaten bibb salad two days prior. Symptoms can appear in two days or two weeks. She thinks it was the salad. No one else ate it. Coincidence? Or just a very sick Tuesday?
Colin Carlson, an epidemiologist, survived his own ordeal. He posted on Bluesky while still waiting for results. He challenged Robert F. Kennedy Jr to a cage match. Half-joking? Hard to say with HHS staffing cuts. A quarter of CDC staff is gone. Testing capacity shrinks. Paranoia grows.
Washing veggies helps. Vinegar doesn’t. Commercial disinfectants fail. Thorough scrubbing is key. Even then, infection is possible. Bactrim works. Septra works. But only if you have the right parasite. Joel Barratt at Emory warns against self-diagnosis.
“If you get the wrong treatment,” Barratt says. You stay sick.
Don’t guess. Call the doctor. Ask for the specific test. Or just drink water. Wait it out. Or maybe don’t.
