Cyclospora (and other diarrhea-inducing parasites)

It's July 2026, and the United States is dealing with an outbreak of cyclospora. Diarrhea makes people think of Kelly, so today we're dealing with the many questions Kelly has gotten about parasites in our food supplies. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 1:47Speaker 05

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Howdy, extraordinaries. We're recording this episode in July of 2026 in the middle of an outbreak of a parasite known as Cyclospora. Cyclospora appears to have contaminated some of the United States' food supply and is causing intense diarrhea in those who have become infected. Apparently, when people hear intense diarrhea, they think Kelly Weinersmith. Because wow, I've been hearing from a lot of you. I will take this as a compliment. So today, we're going to talk about Cyclospora. And we're also going to talk about some other diarrhea-inducing parasites that are important for public health. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Runny Universe. And P.S., as always, remember, I'm not a medical doctor.

• 3:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you have diarrhea that concerns you, go see a real doctor.

• 3:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who likes to think about aliens, and I eat a lot of bagged salad, or at least I used to.

• 3:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites in space. And yes, I also eat a lot of bagged lettuces and have considered giving them to the geese instead.

• 3:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Considered? Does that mean you're still eating pre-processed, pre-washed lettuce?

• 3:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, it does.

• 3:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, interesting.

• 3:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I live dangerously, man.

• 3:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, when this whole thing broke in the news, of course, the first person I messaged for advice about what I should and should not eat was my favorite parasitologist, which of course is you, Kelly.

• 4:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, thanks. Yes, when Cyclospora made the news as an outbreak in July 2026, it wasn't just you who sent me messages. It was all of my extended friends and family that I haven't heard from in years. And a lot of the extraordinaries, apparently when people hear diarrhea, they think Kelly.

• 4:24Daniel Whiteson?

  And is that something that pleased you? You're like, look, I have relevant expertise, finally.

• 4:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  The funny thing is, I don't have relevant expertise. It took a long time to prepare for this episode. These are not parasites that I've worked on or thought about much ever. The other interesting connection here is that the one other time in my life that a bunch of people I hadn't talked to for a very long time thought of me and reached out was when Taco Bell brought back their Mexican pizza.

• 4:52Daniel Whiteson?

  What's the Kelly connection there?

• 4:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  I guess I really liked Mexican pizzas. And I didn't realize how much I liked them because a bunch of people were like, Kelly, the Mexican pizza's back. And I was like, so? And they're like, you loved those. And I was like, oh, I loved those. And I know it's kind of interesting, the things that people remember about you that did not seem important to you at the time.

• 5:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I have a theory about that, based on very little data, which is that you're a very polite person and a very positive person. So maybe these folks just like went to Taco Bell with you one time, and you just like enthused about your food because you're a very positive person and that made an impression on them.

• 5:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Could be, yeah, could be. Thank you. I do get, I get excited about just about everything. Because you know, we do have it pretty good in general.

• 5:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's true. It is amazing that I could just like go to the store and buy a bag of pre-washed, pre-mixed salad, and it's pretty good. I used to make salads every single day from scratch. You know, you buy all the ingredients, you wash them, you chop them. It was a lot of work, but I was dedicated to eating salads. And then with the rise of bagged salads, I was like, this is amazing. But I've often wondered, like, what is the infrastructure behind this? Is it really expensive for the environment? Is it opening us up to weird new bugs and parasites? And I guess now we know.

• 6:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I don't necessarily know that the rise of bagged salads is the thing you can put your finger on for like, this is why we are at increased risk.

• 6:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 6:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  So, you know, in this case, it was shredded lettuce that got sent to Taco Bell. So it wasn't even like bagged mixed salads. And, you know, you can get sick if you go to a farmer's market and you buy lettuce that people, you know, cut off of the ground and threw in a bag, and you're just buying it that way. It's not mixed up with other stuff. The bad news here, Daniel, is that there's a lot of routes from butts to mouths.

• 6:47Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, let's dispense with Daniel's unfounded theories of the demise of society and get into the episode. It wasn't just me who contacted you about this. Didn't we also hear from listeners?

• 6:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  We heard from so many listeners. Here is a subset of folks who thought about diarrhea and then thought about Kelly.

• 7:07Speaker 07

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. This is Matt from Northwest Indiana. I am curious about cryptosporidiosis. Hopefully, I said that right. That name is horrible. So several years ago now, when my wife Sydney and I were still in college, she was visiting Peru on a month-long class trip. She had a great time, but it was difficult adjusting to the dietary differences of the region. Leafy greens or roughage of any kind were in short supply. So when they did find a place serving salad, most of the class indulged heavily. Even before she returned home, she was not feeling well. She had stomach cramps, fatigue. And throughout her first evening back in the States, she was overcome with very intense diarrhea. Naturally, we went to the hospital and she was given fluids, and they confirmed it was something called cryptosporidiosis, or simply crypto, which, by the way, horrible name. I assume the root is Greek or Latin. It probably means something non-threatening,

• 7:51Speaker 07

  but it immediately made me think of Tales from the Crypt, which was a childhood nightmare, if you will, for me, but I digress. Sydney had to do a few interviews with folks from the CDC, tracking where she went in Peru and if any other students complained of similar symptoms, which several of them did. But they also stressed heavily that this parasite could have killed her, which at first felt kind of dramatic, but she was definitely dehydrated. Would a crypto fatality be caused by dehydration or something else? I suppose my question in the broadest sense is, what is this bug's deal? What did it do to her to produce these symptoms? Did it likely come from icky water, contaminated produce? A recent episode of the pod on cholera shook this memory loose as the symptoms sounded pretty similar. But are the parasitic mechanisms the same? Thanks to you both. Love the show.

• 8:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Hello, president of parasites. How worried should I be about Cyclospora? I eat a lot of salads and I'm lazy, so bagged salads are very convenient. Should I change my habits, or is this still very rare and remote? Thank you.

• 8:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sarah Tabor is a farm activist worth listening to. She ran for North Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture in 2024, which is how I started following her. If she's talking about a widespread outbreak of explosive diarrhea, I think that's something you really should explore. As a public service. Is it cryptosporidium norovirus, a parasite given a leg up by the climate crisis? Inquiring minds want to know. However, we definitely need an answer to the explosive diarrhea outbreak. In my lawyer days, I worked on Clean Water Act cases with the NRDC. I don't know if it's an explanation for the current outbreak on the East Coast, but I know that in California, concentrated animal feed operations, CAFOs,

• 9:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  in the Central Valley, crowd thousands of cattle into relatively confined areas, which are surrounded by farmland. Cattle poop. And the runoff from that poop, if it's not carefully confined, it's not, can reach groundwater. Downstream crops, especially leafy greens, can uptake that contaminated water through their roots, which is why washing the greens when you get them home doesn't remove the bacteria. I hate CAFOs, and the cattle probably aren't too thrilled either.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Hey, Dan, Nellie, Kelly. Glory Dan checking in. I've got a question for you guys today about parasites. My father often avoids eating fruits because he's concerned about getting parasites from them. Can we actually get parasites simply by eating fruit? If so, what parasites are they and what fruits would they typically be found on? Thank you.

• 10:17Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so Kelly, tell us how big of a problem is this?

• 10:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, it's pretty big. So according to the World Health Organization, 1.7 billion kiddos suffer from diarrheal diseases every year.

• 10:29Daniel Whiteson?

  1.7 billion with a B?

• 10:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Billion with a B.

• 10:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Like a big fraction of humanity we're talking about?

• 10:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  A big fraction of humanity has a diarrheal disease. And this could also be like E. coli. It's definitely not just cyclospora. There's lots of parasites and pathogens that can cause diarrhea. But diarrhea globally is still a huge problem.

• 10:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, does that mean like that the volume of diarrhea produced annually is like

• 10:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no.

• 10:53Daniel Whiteson?

  a pretty big number in terms of like liters or swimming pools or something?

• 10:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't know the number of Olympic swimming pools full of diarrhea that our species creates each year, but it's probably a lot. It's probably a big number. But, you know, and so that is funny. But about half a million kids under the age of nine every year die from diarrheal diseases. I know I'm such a stinking ray of sunshine. But a lot of these cases of diarrhea could be avoided if people had safe drinking water and better sanitation. And that's going to be a theme for today. But because I am a parasite person, we're going to, for today, stay away from the bacteria and viruses that cause diarrhea and focus on the parasites. And so what we're talking about here are single-celled eukaryotic critters.

• 11:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  So they've got, you know, a nucleus, membrane-bound organelles, stuff like that, rather than bacteria and viruses. And so we're talking about stuff that like is distantly related to malaria, for example, just to help you get like a foothold. These are small, you can't see them with the naked eye.

• 11:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Wait, malaria is caused by a parasite?

• 11:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Malaria is caused by a parasite that is, you know, distantly related, but like somewhat related to the parasites that we're talking about today.

• 12:07Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so my calculations suggest that there's about 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools of diarrhea produced by humans every year.

• 12:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 12:16Daniel Whiteson?

  And now you're telling me that we're only focusing on a fraction of that that's produced by parasitic infections, not parasitic infections, parasitic. What's the word?

• 12:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, parasitic infections with parasites.

• 12:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 12:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Daniel Whiteson?

  What fraction of those 10,000 swimming pools do you think probably come from parasites? Are we dealing with the bulk of the diarrhea or a little offshoot, a little rivulet of it?

• 12:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, God. All right, let's say somewhere in between. So sometimes it can be hard to identify the particular cause of a diarrheal disease. And so you aggregate. Like, I'll be giving you some numbers, mostly US-based, for the parasites we're talking about today to help you get a handle on how common these things are.

• 12:53Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So we're focusing on the parasites. And what are the parasites that mostly cause diarrhea?

• 13:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  So before we get into the species, let's go ahead and do like an overview just to make it easier. Because if we go into too much detail about the species, I think it's easy to get sort of bogged down with information. So let's talk about some like commonalities first to make this a little easier to digest. So for all of the four parasites we're talking about today, symptoms they cause include watery diarrhea, stomach pain, nausea and vomiting. You usually get a little bit of a fever and you don't have much of an appetite. We don't have vaccines for any of these.

• 13:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 13:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which sucks. And they all take about a week for symptoms to show up after you get infected. So we're going to talk about what they're doing to your gut in particular. But this week between ingestion and the onset of symptoms is part of what makes it so hard to figure out where outbreaks start.

• 13:50Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, I'm really curious, like, why it takes a week to get the symptoms? And why exactly they cause diarrhea? Like, is it a byproduct? Are they intentionally causing diarrhea because it helps, you know, with their life cycle or whatever? Dig into the details for me.

• 14:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so you gotta hold on a little bit. We, for each one of them, they induce diarrhea for slightly different reasons. And they're doing slightly different things inside your gut, which I think is absolutely fascinating. And I'm gonna, you know, to cut to the chase, nobody's gonna be surprised to hear me say, we don't understand really well what is exactly causing the diarrhea. But the things that they're doing when they're inside of our intestines make it pretty easy to imagine why diarrhea is happening. So I, we will get to that, I promise.

• 14:35Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so how do we run into these critters? Why do they end up in our guts?

• 14:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so for all of them, we're talking about the fecal-oral route again, which we'll call poop-to-mouth. Yeah, I know, it's so gross, it's so gross. But there's so many ways these parasites can get to us. They can get to us by changing diapers. So these are parasites you have to be really worried about in like childcare settings. These are parasites that you can get by drinking water at the public pool, which is why if anyone poops in the pool, they immediately shut the whole pool down. You know, like, the first time someone shut a pool down because a baby pooped in the pool, my first thought was, wasn't that what the chlorine is for? But like, you need a lot more chlorine to kill these parasites. And some of them are resistant to chlorine, which is a real pain.

• 15:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  So drinking water from a public pool, drinking water from a beautiful bubbling brook or a river or a lake, there's wild animals out there pooping. Or, you know, if we're talking about something like cyclospora, it's because human feces accidentally ended up getting on our food and then gets into our face.

• 15:40Daniel Whiteson?

  I gotta say, Kelly, for like how gross it is, the concept of like, you know, the poop-to-mouth route, nobody wants to be eating poop. And it's dangerous. Why aren't we better at keeping poop out of our water and out of our food? Like, it seems like it should be a priority.

• 15:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, I know, right? But, okay, so before we talk about how it goes wrong and why that's frustrating, I do think we should note that we actually do a good job most of the time. Like, the reason the cyclospora thing is in the news is because something fell apart and now we have cyclospora and it's news because it doesn't happen often. And so, you know, most of the time, at least if you live in the United States, you can take a sip of water from the faucet and you don't have to worry about getting a parasite that's going to give you diarrhea.

• 16:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  So one of the problems for some of these parasites is that it's not just humans that are in the life cycle of the parasites. So for example, if you're out and you take a drink from a beautiful river, you might be ingesting a parasite that was put there by beavers. There's another parasite we're going to talk about today that's a really big problem for cattle. And so if you have cattle that are anywhere in a watershed and the rain washes cattle poop into a stream that subsequently feeds a public water supply, then you've got a problem there, too.

• 16:56Daniel Whiteson?

  But if you're taking water from a stream for a public water supply, you gotta clean it. You can't just be like, look, we found some water. I mean, if I'm out hiking and I see a stream, I don't just like put my face into it, right? I like only filter it or treat it or whatever. So why aren't we cleaning our public water to prevent there from being poop in it?

• 17:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, but again, we are cleaning our water and that's why this doesn't happen often. But, yeah, well, so some outbreaks that have happened in the past have happened at facilities where some part of their water treatment equipment had broken down and they just didn't realize it yet. And then people started getting sick and they didn't realize it. And then sometimes the problem is that like to kill these parasites takes a lot of chlorine and maybe not enough was added at a certain time. And so, you know, this is like a system that needs constant surveillance and vigilance. And sometimes that falls apart.

• 17:48Daniel Whiteson?

  I was hearing today an interview on NPR with an expert at the FDA who was saying that they just don't have the resources to like, check if farms are following protocols. Like, farmers, if they see a pile of animal poop on their iceberg lettuce field, are supposed to like, cordon it off, and nobody's supposed to ever get that lettuce that's near the poop. But the FDA doesn't even have the resources to send inspectors to visit farms every three years.

• 18:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 18:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, that's too much for the FDA to handle. So basically, I think we're relying on farms and farmers and mega corporations to police themselves, and we always know how well that goes.

• 18:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, okay, so then let's, let's jump to some recent regulatory changes. We can talk about that now. So like, you were talking about on farms, if there is poop in the field, you're supposed to cordon it off.

• 18:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  But if somebody has pooped in the field, that probably means you have not given them access to a toilet, or you have not given them sufficient breaks so that they can get to a toilet. It could just mean someone got lazy, but like-

• 18:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Or it could be animal poop also, right?

• 18:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or it could be animal poop also, right? But you know, animal poop kinda looks like soil, right? And after a little while, it becomes soil. That's like, part of the process.

• 19:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 19:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so I think it's easy to miss these things. And yes, it does sound like there's a shortage of people. And an increasing problem here is that in 2025, the Trump administration cut back a lot of jobs, and those jobs got cut at the federal, state, and local level.

• 19:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 19:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so there's a lot of reports from public health officials right now saying, "Look, it's always been hard to do our job, and it's even harder to do our job now-

• 19:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  -because we don't have the people power that we need." Uh, you know, we were already underpowered before. Another problem is that there are different places where you are required to report foodborne illness. So for example, if someone comes into your doctor's office and you decide that they've encountered cyclospora, in 2025, you would need to report that to at least two places, I believe. One of them was FoodNet. And so FoodNet kept track of a bunch of different foodborne illnesses, but as of 2025, the Trump administration said, "You don't need to report to FoodNet anymore. There's only two diseases that you need to report to FoodNet." Their argument was that there are other organizations that deal with foodborne illnesses.

• 20:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  And to be fair, the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System is a system still in place where cyclospora should be reported to if you happen to encounter it. But you used to also need to report it to FoodNet. And so the more connections we have between the people whose job it is to try to make sure these diseases aren't getting to us, and once they do get to us, that we identify the source and get it off of our shelves quickly, like, that system has become less robust in the last year or so. Not ideal. And so a bunch of public health officials are saying, "In the past, we probably would have nailed this down sooner." But as we'll talk about it, it's hard to nail down the, the sources of these things. So real quick, let's, let's talk about what happens when an outbreak starts.

• 20:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  So, uh, you know, some doctor's office, for example, might identify one or more cases of cyclospora, or some other foodborne illness that we're talking about today, or poop-to-mouth illness. Uh, and then they have to report it to the state and federal levels, in some cases, depending on the disease.

• 21:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 21:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then, public health officials will go, and they'll interview anyone who has been identified as having encountered this parasite and become infected by it.

• 21:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Interview meaning like, tell us everything you've eaten in the last three weeks, and every time you've dipped your finger in a stream or something?

• 21:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right. And, and you've identified why this is so hard, right? And so if the deal was, they were looking at something where you eat it, and then 12 hours later, you have horrible diarrhea-

• 21:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 21:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  -then you'd only have 12 hours of like, "What did you eat? Where did you go?" to think about. But if the illness takes one to two weeks to start showing symptoms, you've gotta remember, like, "In the last two weeks, did I go to Taco Bell? Did I go to Burger King? How many bag salads did I eat? Did I-"

• 21:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Did I go swimming?

• 21:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did I go swimming, right? Did I have sex with a partner where I interacted with their butthole at all? Like, I, I'm sorry, but that is another common routes that you find on like, the CDC and the FDA webpages. Like, there's just a lot of different routes through which you can encounter a lot of these kinds of parasites. And then it's someone's job to go through all of those data and look for commonalities. Like, okay, everybody who got cyclospora, you know, went to Taco Bell, for example, and they got something with lettuce in it.

• 22:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  But to be clear, the data are almost never exactly that straightforward. Like, there will be, somebody will say to you, like, "Yes, I went to Taco Bell, but my brother was with me. We had the exact same thing, and he doesn't have diarrhea."

• 22:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 22:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  And a lot of these parasites, for some people, they're entirely asymptomatic, so they won't get diarrhea, even though the parasite is living in their gut.

• 22:41Daniel Whiteson?

  What?

• 22:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  We don't understand why.

• 22:43Daniel Whiteson?

  That's crazy. Some people just win the parasite lottery?

• 22:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right! Which makes it so hard to like, you know, know what signal is the signal you should be paying attention to. Cause you know, you can imagine, if you say like, "All right, a bunch of people ate at Taco Bell, but this person went with their brother, they ate the same thing, the brother didn't get sick." Probably it's not the Taco Bell.

• 23:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, yeah, that'd be useful to rule it out.

• 23:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  That would be useful to rule it out. But another thing that makes it tough is that if it takes seven to 14 days for symptoms to show up, usually in that amount of time, whatever it was that was causing the illness has expired and been removed from the shelves. And so ideally, what you want is to like, have someone who has diarrhea, which you, of course, you don't want that, but if they do, you'd like to collect some of their feces, extract the parasites, get the whole genome for the parasite, and then find the source that you think caused the infection, extract the parasite from, for example, that lettuce, and then match up the genome in the lettuce with the genome coming out of the person, so you can say, "Bam, this is the source." Does that make sense?

• 23:44Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. So you're using the DNA of the parasite as like, a tracker?

• 23:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 23:50Daniel Whiteson?

  You're saying, "There's a community of parasites out there, they all have slightly different DNA. If I can match the DNA, what's in my gut, to the DNA of the parasite I found in this stream, then I can say, 'This was the source that ended up in my gut.'"

• 24:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right. Or, or for the example that's sort of plaguing the United States right now, if you can find a farm where the parasite that's in the lettuce on that farm matches the parasite in someone's gut up in Michigan, then you can say, "Okay, probably the lettuce from this Taylor Fields farm in Mexico is the source." In this case, it seems like the lettuce came from Taylor Farms de Mexico. My Spanish is really good, everybody. And so, uh, and so they probably need to be held to the same standards as US-based producers, and Taylor Farms should be sending people to go check out what's happening from time to time. But it looked like something fell apart. And so, another step that happens here, that's sort of in between what we've talked about

• 24:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  so far, is that if it turns out that you think, for example, it's lettuce from Taco Bell, then you say, "Okay, Taco Bell, where did you get your lettuce from? You're supposed to be keeping careful records."

• 24:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 25:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so they'll tell you, "All right, we got it from Taylor Farms." And so then you'll say, "All right, Taylor Farms, which bags of lettuce did you send to Taco Bell? And where did the lettuce in each of those bags come from?" And they're supposed to be keeping super detailed records-

• 25:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 25:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  -so that they can tell you exactly which farm the lettuce came from, and that could change over time.

• 25:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Sounds like a good plan.

• 25:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sounds like a good plan, right. And then you have to go and actually visit those farms and try to find it. But again, these symptoms could be showing up weeks after. And so a lot, in a lot of cases, you're not gonna find the smoking gun, because the lettuce has expired, it's been thrown out, it's in the trash, you can't necessarily find those connections anymore. So for the outbreak we're having right now, it appears that what happened is that they've tracked it back to a particular farm, they haven't been able yet to get a positive sample, where they say, "Definitely found cyclospora at Taylor Farms de Mexico's farm, and it matches with what's in the gut of somebody up in Michigan." But they have been able to say that every, you know, pretty much everybody who has had

• 26:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  cyclospora, all of the evidence that we have suggests that it routed through Taco Bell, through their lettuce, to Taylor Farms lettuce that came from Mexico.

• 26:12Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So let's take a break, because I need a break. So much poop on the brain. And when we come back, we'll dig into the various critters that can give you diarrhea.

• 26:34Speaker 05

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. To find your creativity and to believe in yourself, because somewhere in the midst of it, I stopped believing that my voice mattered, and that I could find it again. That's a challenge. I was not feeling very confident creatively. Only, um, again, defiant in my belief that what this is about is express something honest. Say something honest.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Stugatz from Stugatz and Company Live. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Corolla.

• 27:49Speaker 04

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• 28:15Speaker 05

  The biggest game of the season, right here, right now. Starts Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox. And here we go. It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon Kickoff, live with an epic pregame. The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes it special. Then it's America's number one game. What a hit. The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest games. Down the sideline, touchdown. It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws,

• 29:00Speaker 05

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• 29:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we're talking about our VCs-covered world. We like to think we live in a world that's mostly clean and sparkling, but in reality, there's poop everywhere, isn't there, Kelly?

• 29:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's poop everywhere, almost everywhere. And in the United States, about a million people each year get infected by the first parasite we're going to talk about, which is Giardia. Daniel, do you want to guess when Giardia was seen for the first time?

• 29:53Daniel Whiteson?

  The first time it was ever seen, like, in human history?

• 29:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, boy. I'm guessing.

• 29:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like, with the human eye?

• 29:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, with the human eye. I'm guessing the first cases of Giardia probably, like, Babylon.

• 30:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Probably, yeah.

• 30:05Daniel Whiteson?

  But if Giardia is very small, it probably required the invention of the microscope. So I'm guessing a couple hundred years ago?

• 30:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, something like that. But do you want to guess who? Who looked at almost everything that came out of him and reported back to the Royal Society?

• 30:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Is it, what's his name, Van Leeuwenhoek?

• 30:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, yes. He had diarrhea. He put it under the microscope and he saw Giardia and was like, oh, hello.

• 30:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Historical diarrhea. Amazing.

• 30:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, historical diarrhea. Anyway, all right.

• 30:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Is there a museum somewhere that has, like, a sample of his original diarrhea that changed the world?

• 30:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sure hope not. Definitely doubt it. And it didn't change the world because he didn't make the connection between what he was seeing in his poop and the cause of the Giardia.

• 30:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Because, you know, there's a museum for almost everything. Like, I've been to Iceland. I've been to the Phallic Museum.

• 30:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  I've read about that. Yeah.

• 30:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. I have a picture of my kid standing next to a blue whale phallus. It's impressive.

• 31:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nice. The bone, right?

• 31:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. So I imagine somewhere, there's a museum of diarrhea.

• 31:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, I got to be honest, I wouldn't be opposed to that as a museum idea because I feel like, you know, diarrhea has taken away many people throughout history, you know, whether it was cholera or, like, dysentery during wars. And so I feel like you could have a pretty interesting human history story told through the Museum of Diarrhea and, like, one of the greatest human victories, in my opinion, ever is, like, our amazing sewage systems. And so I would go to that museum, Daniel.

• 31:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sign me up.

• 31:42Daniel Whiteson?

  So tell us about Van Leeuwenhoek's diarrhea.

• 31:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, well, that's all I had to say on the topic of Van Leeuwenhoek's diarrhea. But Giardia is unique amongst the diarrheal parasites, and that is the only one where the descriptions of symptoms include really awful farts and stinky, greasy, floating poops. And I got to tell you, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it was about Giardia in particular that resulted in stinky, greasy, floating poops as opposed to the other kinds of poops. I couldn't get to the bottom of it, Daniel. I spent hours and I could not get to the bottom of it.

• 32:16Daniel Whiteson?

  You mean, like, people don't know? Or you couldn't find the answer?

• 32:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  So when I was looking up, how does Giardia cause diarrhea? I found this quote, "The mechanisms by which Giardia causes diarrhea and intestinal malabsorption are probably multifactorial and not yet fully elucidated." We don't know.

• 32:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 32:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  We don't. But, but what we do know is that when it gets into your intestines, it has this disc, and it uses the disc to stick to the little, like, finger-like projections that go out into your stomach, across which things are absorbed. These are called villi. And it sticks to the villi, and it causes them to flatten and start sticking together. And so the surface that you used to use to, like, absorb stuff into your body now have much less surface area because they're, like, smooshed and touching each other. And that makes it harder for your body to absorb the food and the water that you drink. So presumably, more of it just passes right through.

• 33:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  But again, the connection between knowing that it's, like, messing up the villi and the exact reason why you get this particular kind of diarrhea is something I don't think that we know yet.

• 33:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm. And when you say it causes stinky poops, like, all poops are stinky? So is this, like, especially stinky? Or, like, stinky in a weirdly Giardia fashion? Like, could a Giardia specialist smell a poop and be like, oh, yeah, that's Giardia?

• 33:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think yes. Right? So I had a roommate who went to Guyana to go visit her girlfriend. And when she came back, first, she got dumped, but second, she got Giardia. And so it was, like, a particularly bad trip for her. But she complained that, like, her poop smelled so weird, like, wait, you know, we've all had diarrhea at some point in our life, right? But this was different. And I fortunately didn't live with her at this point. I moved in with her later. But, uh, but anyway, so, so, yeah, I think it's, it's a unique odor, apparently.

• 34:15Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So we know these things are, like, attaching to the lining of the stomach, and that obviously is going to affect your digestion. We don't understand exactly why it causes weird poops or diarrhea, whatever. But what's the whole life cycle? Why are they attaching to the lining of our stomach? How does that benefit them?

• 34:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So the way that you get it is you ingest, like, a cyst stage that's in the water. And it can be put in the water by other people who pooped in the water. It can be put in the water by beavers. Beavers are pretty common carriers of this parasite. And so they're doing their little beaver thing. They poop in the water. And then you think, oh, it's so pristine out here. I'm going to take a drink without first boiling and/or filtering my water.

• 34:53Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, I had no reason to dislike beavers until today. I was just 100% pro beaver. And now I'm like, wow, there's something in the negative column for beavers. They poop in the water.

• 35:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm still 100% pro beaver, man. Like, our poop probably gets in the water sometimes, too. Like, don't, it's not their fault. It's Giardia's fault.

• 35:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm not saying it swung me all the way to anti-beaver. I'm saying now there is something in the negative column, whereas it used to be just everything was good about beavers.

• 35:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, all right. Well, you do you. I still like beavers. We have a couple families of beavers on our property. And I, yeah, I actually saw one of their dams, the recent, like, monsoon-style rains we got here in Virginia, in the middle of our giant flood, washed out their dam, which was, I hope they're rebuilding.

• 35:38Daniel Whiteson?

  And don't you drink well water? Is that potentially contaminated by beaver poop?

• 35:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Yeah. So you do have to worry about that. If you live in, like, a wildernessy kind of area, you have to be careful. We do check our water once a year. But I am more concerned with the proximity between my septic field and my well water, which is still, like, more than sufficiently far away up to code or whatever. But yes, when you live out in an area like I do, you do need to get your water tested regularly to see if human feces or animal feces have managed to get in.

• 36:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 36:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  But anyway, so you accidentally consume it. It passes through the stomach, and when it gets to the intestine, it breaks out of the cyst.

• 36:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 36:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. So it's got to get through the stomach first. I don't know why it's the intestines in particular that are the best place for it to live, but because it needs to produce cysts that go back into the environment, attaching to the intestines, replicating like crazy, producing more cysts and inducing diarrhea seems like a pretty good way to get your babies back out into the environment.

• 36:40Daniel Whiteson?

  But why do you need to induce diarrhea? I mean, you're in the intestines, you produce more cysts, they can just go in the normal poop, right? Why do you have to interfere? Why do you have to cause cramps and make everybody so miserable?

• 36:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I could imagine diarrhea being more likely to get, like, washed into a waterway or get, like, you know, maybe you are walking along a river. And if you need to have your normal bowel movement, you'll be like, I can make it home. But if you've got diarrhea, you're not making it home. And so it just happens where it happens. And, you know, I think for some of these things, you look, it's tempting to look for evolutionary reasons. And I can imagine that.

• 37:15Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm sorry, I'm still stuck on diarrhea, colon. It happens where it happens.

• 37:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe that should be the title of this episode.

• 37:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Or like a t-shirt or something.

• 37:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, something like that. Something uplifting. But anyway, so that's the life cycle.

• 37:31Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 37:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you go to the vet, you might hear that your dog or cat has Giardia. That doesn't necessarily mean that you need to worry. The dog and cat versions don't usually jump to people. But you should always wash your hands after dealing with animal waste. And, you know, don't let your dogs put their butts on your pillows. This is like, one of my, this is one of the things where I feel like I go to loads of houses and people's dogs are up on their beds with their butts on their pillows. And I'm like, friends, no, your face goes there later.

• 38:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, also, a lot of people kiss their dogs or let their dogs lick their faces. And I'm like, have you seen where your dog's face has been? Because it's been up its own butt or its neighbor's butt. And so, yeah, people should think about that.

• 38:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  They should, yes. I'm going on the record.

• 38:16Daniel Whiteson?

  But in terms of Giardia, you get it in you. You get diarrhea. Does it naturally just progress? Does your immune system eventually tackle these things? Or do you just have Giardia forever unless you take some anti-parasitic medicines?

• 38:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So some people are asymptomatic.

• 38:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 38:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  And will have it for a long time. Some people get really bad symptoms, and we do have medication that you can give them to treat it. And in some people, it will go away on its own. But again, I am not a medical doctor, so if you think you have Giardia, let your doctor tell you if you should see if it goes away on its own, or if you should be taking some medication for that.

• 38:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sorry. Thanks for bleeping that, Matt. And look, I included a photo because Giardia, if you are a parasitologist, we tend to think of Giardia as one of the more charismatic looking parasites.

• 39:04Daniel Whiteson?

  What?

• 39:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you see the picture?

• 39:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 39:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it has two nuclei that look like eyes. In the picture that I sent you, it doesn't have, there's like another organelle that kind of looks like a smiling mouth. It's missing in this artist's rendition. And it also has multiple pairs of flagella, which are long, like hair like things that it uses to help it move around.

• 39:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  And they kind of like, it makes it look like they've got a little bit of hair on top of their head, like they've got like a sort of wavy mustache that comes down. No?

• 39:32Daniel Whiteson?

  No, I'm not seeing it. No, there's no charisma to this thing. No.

• 39:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, you are 100% wrong. The number of my friends who have jewelry with Giardia on it is, is there's a lot of us.

• 39:42Daniel Whiteson?

  This thing which causes human suffering and death, you guys are celebrating and elevating to the level of jewelry. Cool.

• 39:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, let's talk about, let's talk about death. So for all of the parasites that we're talking about today, if you are immunocompetent, so you're not having immune system issues, so you don't have HIV/AIDS, you haven't recently had an organ transplant, you know, there's a long list, you're not being treated for cancer or anything like that, most of these parasites aren't going to kill you. And there's treatments for them and you will feel unpleasant, but especially if you're in a developed country, we can get it under control. The folks where we need to worry are people who are immunocompromised. And in some cases, we don't have good medications to help people who are immunocompromised when they get infected by these parasites. And so, yes, I know, every time we talk about parasites, you sort of squash my enthusiasm

• 40:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  for the topic by talking about all the people who are suffering. I care about the people who are suffering, but I can also have immense respect for parasites that manage to eke out a living in such a like, complex and efficient way.

• 40:48Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, I think it's fair. You asked me if I worry about the suffering of protons at the large hair.

• 40:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you said no. And then we moved on.

• 40:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then you said you've killed billions of them probably that have been around for billions of years and you ended what could have been an infinite lifespan.

• 41:06Daniel Whiteson?

  That's true. Yes, but protons don't cause diarrhea, Coe.

• 41:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right.

• 41:12Daniel Whiteson?

  I guess, you know, protons assembled in the form of Giardia do, so.

• 41:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Yeah. Right. Right. Your protons cause suffering.

• 41:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Interesting philosophical question there. Who's to blame really for the diarrhea?

• 41:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Okay, let's try to get one more parasite in before our break.

• 41:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 41:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the next one is a parasite called Entamoeba histolytica. So this one is one of the nastier ones. It infects about 50 million people worldwide and about 25,000 to 100,000 deaths are attributed to this parasite annually. Yeah, this is not cool. One of the reasons it's really hard to study this particular parasite is that there are other organisms in our gut that look almost exactly the same and they are very closely related. And so for a long time, people had trouble identifying this as a cause of diarrhea because they'd be like, well, we see this when people have diarrhea, we also see this when people don't have diarrhea. And it took a while to figure out that they were looking at different organisms.

• 42:09Daniel Whiteson?

  So that means there are other amoeba in our guts that don't cause diarrhea?

• 42:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 42:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 42:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 42:16Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, I knew there were microbes living within, and I don't think I knew that they were like amoeba, just like happily hanging out.

• 42:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 42:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we do contain multitudes, don't we?

• 42:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  We sure do. Yeah. We should bring Katrina on to see what she knows about that amoeba. But anyway, so there's, I came across this interesting story that was mentioned in a couple of different places. I haven't been able to trace it to the source yet, but I'm excited about it. So I'm going to share it anyway. Apparently there's a guy named Fritz Schauden, who was interested in trying to figure out the difference between the amoeba that cause disease and the amoeba that don't.

• 42:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 42:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so it sounds like he purposefully infected himself with the ones that cause disease to prove it.

• 42:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Your favorite thing?

• 42:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  My favorite thing. But one of the problems with this parasite is that, so it goes into your intestine, it tends to live in like the mucus that lines your intestine, but every once in a while, it will start like essentially burrowing deeper and causing pathology like along your intestine, or it will escape from your intestine entirely and go through your blood to different parts of the body. And this is how it ends up killing people. And so this poor guy Fritz, he ended up getting a particularly bad case and died during a surgery to try to like deal with the complications from having it. But I think he showed pretty well that one of them is pathogenic and one of them is not. So anyway, this is definitely one of those where if you get it, you want to take medications

• 43:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  to get rid of it. And we have amoebicides to get rid of it.

• 43:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Amoebicides, wow.

• 43:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amoebicides, that's right.

• 43:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Why does one of them cause these complications and other amoeba don't?

• 43:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  We don't know.

• 43:52Daniel Whiteson?

  We don't know?

• 43:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, I don't think we know. Yeah. Nope. I don't think we know.

• 43:56Daniel Whiteson?

  So Fritz Schauden gave his life in vain?

• 43:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, I think it's important to know that there are some that cause disease and there are some that are just commensals because now like you can more easily diagnose somebody. And there's a lot of different causes of diarrhea, right? And so if you see this amoeba, or if you see amoeba in the feces, you say to yourself, I've got to figure out if this is the bad amoeba, or if they just happen to have some of the okay amoeba, because if they've got the bad amoeba, there's a bunch of additional complications I have to worry about in case this thing gets into their blood. And so now you like treat more aggressively. And a lot of people are thought to have irritable bowel syndrome when they actually have this parasite.

• 44:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 44:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not like all of them. It's just this happens from time to time. And so, you know, I think it's important to know that this is a thing that can cause disease that kind of looks like irritable bowel and you need to check into it in more detail.

• 44:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. All right. That's true. Okay. So we've done two parasites so far, Giardia and these amoebi.

• 44:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep.

• 44:51Daniel Whiteson?

  If you had to be infected by one of them, which would you choose?

• 44:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Giardia. Out of all the ones that we're talking.

• 44:57Daniel Whiteson?

  There at all.

• 44:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  No way, man. I would not want Entamoeba histolytica. Like if this thing, the complications from this one are particularly nasty, this is one you want to avoid.

• 45:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 45:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  But there's two more we get to talk about. And so let's take a break. And when we get back, we will talk about two more parasites that actually live inside of the cells in your intestine.

• 45:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, boy.

• 45:29Speaker 05

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life. To find your creativity and to believe in yourself, because somewhere in the midst of it, I stopped believing that my voice mattered and that I could find it again. That's a challenge. I was not feeling very confident creatively, only, again, defiant in my belief that what this is about is express something honest, say something honest.

• 46:23Speaker 05

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:32Speaker 07

  This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Timp. Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places. The biggest game of the season, right here, right now. Starts Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox. And here we go.

• 47:14Speaker 07

  It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon Kickoff, live with an epic pregame. The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes us special. Then it's America's number one game. What a hit. The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest games. Down the sideline touchdown. It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count.

• 47:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  On apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by ondeck or Celtic Bank. Ondeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 48:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we are inducing nightmares. You know, I had a friend email me about our recent rat lungworm episode and they were like, look, I came for the physics and I like the biology, but two parasitologists on the show at the same time is a little crazy.

• 48:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh no, was it too much for them? This sounds like it was actually a negative email. I've gotten a lot of nice feedback. My people like it.

• 48:36Daniel Whiteson?

  No, it was positive, but I think it was an intense experience for a lot of people.

• 48:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Daniel Whiteson?

  That episode, as it was for me.

• 48:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And you know, so to be honest, when we do one of these intense episodes, I sit back and I think, why, why are we doing this to people? And, and, and I think there's good reason, like, you know, so I think you need to know how bad rat lungworm is so that you can, you know, one, pay attention to if it is coming to your area.

• 49:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yep.

• 49:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  And two, decide what kinds of risks you're willing to take with like your food or know that you need to be managing your salads a little bit more carefully. Like, I think these are things that are important to know about and tiptoeing around them might give you a false sense of security or like, I don't know, it was a chance to put something that I think is important on people's radar, even though it is real nasty.

• 49:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Totally agree. It's important that we know this stuff, especially if it's nasty and it's dangerous, but also totally valid response to say, wow, that was gross and hard to listen to.

• 49:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, yep, yep. Yes. Well, and you know, if there's anything in particular, like a moment where it went too far, you all can let me know and Daniel and Matt know that they can censor me when needed. And so I try to not go too deep into the gross stuff.

• 49:50Daniel Whiteson?

  No, this podcast is all about the joy of knowledge. And so people want to know. I mean, a lot of people wrote in, wanted to hear about this. So let's give it to them.

• 49:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Here it's, here's some more, here's some more knowledge for your brains. So crypto sporidiosis is caused by a couple of different kinds of cryptosporidium parasites.

• 50:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Why is it called crypto? I mean, this has nothing to do with like investing in meme coins.

• 50:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  This came before meme coins, bro. The meme coins are trying to be like cryptosporidium.

• 50:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, okay. Why is it called crypto though? The crypto usually means like hidden or secret, you know, like cryptozoology is like study of Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster and stuff. So what's crypto about cryptosporidium?

• 50:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  I am going to guess on the record here, I don't actually know the answer, but there are parts of your stomach that are called crips.

• 50:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 50:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I am guessing that they are doing something in those little crips, which are sort of like pretty deep inside of like the wall of your intestine.

• 50:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I see. Crypto like Crypt Keeper. Nice. All right.

• 50:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah. I named a parasite, the Crypt Keeper Wasp. So anyway, which we talked about with Scott Egan. So,

• 51:01Daniel Whiteson?

  How common is this one?

• 51:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  About 800,000 cases in the US. It's the second most common cause of diarrhea in kids. So you were asking earlier, you know, of the what 10,000 pools of feces and also you're like, Kelly, you're gross. How many Olympic swimming pools full of poop are we talking about, Kelly? And so maybe you egg me on.

• 51:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I think that's my rule here. Yeah.

• 51:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. All right. So, so a significant portion of those pools are probably filled by crypto, unfortunately.

• 51:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 51:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  And crypto differs a bit from some of the other parasites we've been talking about in that it tends to also be a problem for a lot of other animals like cattle. So there are farms where if the calves get this parasite, they're going, you know, maybe they'll die, but they also grow less well. So it's a problem for productivity. And Kay, who was one of the listeners who asked for like this episode, I think this is what she was referring to at the top of the episode where she was talking about how managing the massive quantities of manure that are produced on cattle farms is like an important public health problem. So you really need to make sure that cattle manure doesn't get washed into waterways because otherwise you might end up getting this parasite.

• 52:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so this parasite, just like the others, you, you know, it's, it's a poop to mouth parasite. If you accidentally ingest the cysts that were excreted in feces, what this parasite does that's kind of interesting is it sticks to the surface of the cells that lie in your intestine. And then the micro, those vele that we were talking about, they get longer and they fuse around it. And so now they make like a little intracellular space. And I don't know if like, in some cases, that's a good strategy for walling off parasites. So they don't cause more problems and it just doesn't work in this case, or if this is a situation where the parasite is manipulating the vele into making

• 52:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  a little home for it. I don't think we know the answer, but now it's intracellular and it starts replicating inside of those cells. And when it's done, it bursts those cells open and goes off in search of new cells and your immune system responds to all of that. And so this is a situation where probably some combination of like physical damage that is happening to your intestine because of the parasite and your immune system responding strongly to that might be what induces diarrhea.

• 53:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Interesting.

• 53:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the same thing happens with cyclospora is also an intracellular parasite. I think the mechanisms are a little different, but the idea there is the same that you're inside of the cells, you burst those cells open from time to time and the immune system responds. You're definitely messing stuff up in your intestine.

• 53:39Daniel Whiteson?

  And you mentioned here that UV light is a powerful way to kill this parasite. Why don't we use UV light on all of our food?

• 53:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I think the answer to that is if you were to buy like, uh, what is it? Is it a head or a heart of romaine lettuce? Why do we name them after body parts? It's a plant. I don't know.

• 53:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Should be called a knee of romaine lettuce.

• 54:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. I think a foot, something. So if you get your foot of romaine lettuce

• 54:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  and you go to pass it under a UV light, there's a lot of like crinkles and areas that probably won't get hit by that UV light. And if you've got something like, you know, romaine lettuce where multiple leaves are stuck together, then, uh, you know, there's going to be areas that don't get hit by that UV light. And you'd have to worry about like, I guess, either rotating it or getting it on both sides as it goes through. This just seems to me like a method that could convince you that you've done a good job of cleaning your food, but it would be very easy to miss areas with the UV light, just because it's not like a sheet where it's easy to get it all.

• 54:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Interesting. I know that UV light passes through water fairly easily. Like you can get a sunburn, even if you're underwater, but I think the outer layers of lettuce cells will not let you be through. So you're right that like the inner layers won't, but more broadly, why don't we use radiation? I think a listener recently wrote in and asked about why we don't use radiation more often to make our food safe.

• 55:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I don't know the answer. My, my guess would be again, that it's hard to make sure you got everything. Do you think the radiation could like damage the plant cells in some way that would make the food less tasty? I don't know.

• 55:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Perhaps. My guess without doing a lot of research is that radiation sounds yucky to people. And they don't want to eat food that's been irradiated because maybe it's going to make them have a third eyeball.

• 55:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 55:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Or poop green slime or something like that.

• 55:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 55:32Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, since Three Mile Island, radiation has a pretty bad rap.

• 55:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, unfortunately. But another thing that's tough about this parasite is that chlorine doesn't do a great job of killing it. And so this is one of the reasons where if a kid poops in the pool, everybody's got to go out because just a little bit of chlorine, bumping up the chlorine, just a little bit, isn't going to do the trick. So like, as I understand it, if a kid is wearing a diaper and they do a solid turd in their diaper, everybody has to get out and they bump up the chlorine a little bit and they call it a day. But if someone has diarrhea and you're worried about crypto, everybody has to get out and they bump the chlorine up massively. And people have to stay out because the chlorine levels are like, you know, burn your skin level

• 56:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  high and you have to wait until the levels go back down again. And so that's why diarrhea can shut down a pool.

• 56:25Daniel Whiteson?

  How do the levels go back down? You just got to add fresh water?

• 56:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think the chlorine evaporates off over time.

• 56:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no, actually, I think the radiation breaks down the chlorine.

• 56:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 56:34Daniel Whiteson?

  The sun's radiation. Yeah.

• 56:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. Interesting. All I know is I need to keep adding chlorine to my pool. It's not building up over time. But yeah, so crypto in particular is a parasite that we worry about in pools and it's not cool that it's so hard to kill it with chlorine. And so finally we get to cyclosporiosis, which is what we are all concerned about today.

• 56:58Daniel Whiteson?

  The newly famous parasite.

• 57:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  The newly famous parasites. One of the things that's interesting about this parasite is that it was a thing that we weren't super worried about from a public health perspective in the United States for a while, but in recent years, we've been seeing more and more outbreaks caused by this parasite. We don't exactly know why, maybe something about changes in temperatures are making it so that the cyst can survive in the environment for longer.

• 57:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Daniel eating so many bag salads.

• 57:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel in particular is a source of cyclo for everybody. Uh, he's got to stop pooping in the lakes and in the pools and, and on the raspberries.

• 57:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. You just took a little joke and went way too far with it.

• 57:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like that's usually your job, but sometimes.

• 57:43Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, I'm going to take heart in the fact that you're not mad at the beavers for pooping in the water. And so.

• 57:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know better, man. You know better. I know where you're going with this. You know better.

• 57:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So anyway, we're seeing more outbreaks. Part of this could be because we're better at detecting it in the environment. So like for a long time, we didn't even have the genome of this parasite so that we could do proper tracing. But we've got the genome now. We have more tools. And if we would just stop firing the people who use these tools, we might be in a better position. But anyway, so this is something that's more often a problem in Canada, Poland, the United Kingdom, the United States than we've seen in the past.

• 58:25Daniel Whiteson?

  And it's the basic story, the same. You're eating the cyst and then it latches on somewhere inside you and it grows and it makes more cysts. And for reasons we don't understand induces diarrhea and the cysts come out in your diarrhea.

• 58:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. So one, one thing that's sort of interesting and a little bit different about this parasite is, you know, for all of the parasite, it takes about a week for, I'm guessing, the damage to your intestines to build up and then you start having diarrhea. But a lot of the parasites, once the parasite gets into the environment again, it's ready to infect the next host. This parasite needs something like a week, depending on temperature. We haven't really been able to study this in the wild very well, but it needs a little while to mature in the environment. And so this means that you don't often get cyclospora passing from, you know, for example, somebody at a daycare center changing a kid's diaper and like passing to the

• 59:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  other kids if hands don't get washed because you've got like a week to disinfect all of your surfaces. So it doesn't usually go from person to person. But if it's in the produce and then it gets shipped around the country, it takes about a week for that to happen. Now the parasite is ready to infect people. And then it takes another week for symptoms to show up.

• 59:39Daniel Whiteson?

  And lots of parasite stories we've heard on this podcast involve like hilarious, different situations. Like it comes out of this creature and then it's got to go up the nose of that one. And then it has to be on the hairs of this guy. Whereas cyclo seems to only grow in the guts of humans. Why isn't there some Rube Goldberg complicated life story here?

• 59:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I, I feel like it's still pretty complicated. It needs to be out in the environment for like a week and then it can get into people. But some of the other parasites that we've been talking about, some of it is complicated. Well, like, so what makes Giordia, for example, more complicated? It seems to me that it's less complicated, that it can live in a beaver, it can live in a human. It's come up with like a more generalist way of doing things. Whereas cyclo is like pretty specific, you know, it needs to get into a human. We think there've been some studies suggesting maybe it can live in a couple other animals. This is like an active area of research, but cyclospora is one of the more human specific pathogens that we've talked about, like cryptosporidium. There's a lot of different species that infect a lot of

• 1:00:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  different animals and some of them can also infect humans. But cyclo is pretty specific.

• 1:00:47Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So I think what a lot of people want to know is Kelly, you're a parasitologist. We're reading a lot of stuff in the news. Nobody really knows what's going on. What should we do? Should we eat bagged salad? Should we only eat canned food and heat it up to 170 degrees? Tell us how to stay safe, Kelly.

• 1:01:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So first of all, if you are a person who's immunocompromised, you need to be extra careful, unfortunately. People can make a decision about for themselves about whether or not, you know, they're feeling comfortable eating bag salads at this point where we don't feel like we've wrapped up all of the details about the current outbreak. I am personally rinsing and hoping it's okay because I feel like the benefits of salad for me outweigh the risks when it looks like we've already identified Taylor Farms is the source. So I'm okay with eating some other salads. But if I was immunocompromised or my kid was, I might make a totally different decision. And so what I can suggest is that websites like the CDC and

• 1:01:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization, all of those websites have advice for how to keep yourself safe. And you should definitely listen to those instead of listening to Kelly. But here are some things that they are going to tell you. They're going to tell you that you should wash your hands regularly, especially before you go to eat and especially if you've been touching livestock, if you've been at a petting zoo, or if you've been changing diapers, you should really carefully wash your hands and sanitize any surfaces that you've touched. Do not swallow water at public pools. I'm looking at you, son of mine. You need to stop doing that. Don't drink water from pools, rivers, lakes, et cetera,

• 1:02:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  unless you have treated it. So there are certain kinds of filters you can buy and there are tips for how long you need to boil water to make sure that you've killed these things. If you are going hiking or you think the apocalypse is coming, you should read up on what to do if you are going to be drinking water that hasn't been properly sanitized beforehand. You should support programs that make sure livestock waste can't get into your waterways. You should be a little concerned that we're firing some of the people who track this stuff down. Those people have important jobs and they need help. Be a little bit cognizant when you're being intimate with your partner about whether you might have come in contact with feces. If you've had diarrhea recently,

• 1:03:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  give it a break for a week. And, you know, try to make sure you're not passing anything to your partners. If you go to an area where these parasites are much more common, keep in mind that people who live in these areas are more likely to be asymptomatic than the rest of us. It could be because throughout their lives, they've been exposed to this parasite at a low level and their immune systems are better able to handle it. But a lot of times, if someone from a developed country goes to a less developed country where the parasite is common, even if everyone else is drinking the tap water and putting the ice in their drinks and they're fine, you might not be. And so if you go to one of these areas, you should drink bottled

• 1:03:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  water. You shouldn't put ice in that water. And you should maybe only eat foods that have been cooked well. So keep in mind that raw fruits and vegetables that have been rinsed in tap water might have the parasite on it. So if you're going to eat fruits, you know, if you want a banana or something, maybe you should go ahead and peel that banana because the inside probably isn't infected with something. But there could be some parasites on the outside. Yeah. And before you travel, you should always check websites like the CDC and the World Health Organization to see what their advice is for when you go to one of those places. So there are ways to keep yourself safe. And one of those ways is by supporting the people whose job it is to try to make sure that you stay safe.

• 1:04:32Daniel Whiteson?

  That sounds like solid advice. All right. So give us Kelly's prediction for the future. Do you think we are facing every year, bigger and bigger outbreaks of these parasites? Or do you think we're going to figure it out and get it under control? Or what does the world look like for our kids, Kelly?

• 1:04:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you were to draw a trend line for cyclospora in the United States, I think you would see cases increasing over time. I don't think that we are powerless in the face of that trend. I think that we could amp up our surveillance and be more careful, both at like the company level and at the level of reporting when people start getting diarrhea, figuring out what it is and reporting that kind of stuff. So, you know, I never like to be negative. I like to be gross, but not, not, not negative. So there are things we can do. And so I'm going to hope that we do those things.

• 1:05:24Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, I think it's always better to know. So thank you for taking us on this sometimes uncomfortable, but very educational journey.

• 1:05:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. I hope none of you have gotten cyclospora and wash your hands.

• 1:05:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Stay clean and stay safe, everybody.

• 1:05:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 1:05:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 1:05:59Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 1:06:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 1:06:14Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 1:06:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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