Caroline Hopkins Legaspi

speaker

93 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Caroline Hopkins Legaspi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Daily · The Cyclospora Mystery: How Human Poop Got on So Much Lettuce · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

So the water that's used to irrigate the plants, to wash the lettuce,

to spray it with pesticides, any of those uses of water, you're distributing potentially a contaminated water source over all of the crops.

Exactly.

So that's where you go back to nearby bathroom facilities, latrines, sewage overflow, any of these explanations for how poop water essentially can get onto these plants.

Yuck is right.

For example, in the late 90s, there were a series of outbreaks that they were able to trace back to some farms in Guatemala that grew raspberries.

And in those cases, the leading theory was that this water source that they had used to mix with a powder pesticide to make it a liquid solution, they could spray all over the raspberries, that water source had been contaminated completely.

And similarly, in 2020, they traced an outbreak that affected iceberg lettuce and cabbage and carrots back to some farms in Florida that had been contaminated with water from a canal.

And this also means that when you're in the grocery store looking at pre-washed bags of lettuce, they're probably contaminated.

at an even greater risk than the whole heads of lettuce.

And the reason for that is that the agricultural water that could have been contaminated is being used to wash this lettuce.

So, you know, you're seeing triple wash.

You might think that's safer.

But in reality, it's kind of ironic that bag of pre-washed lettuce might have been exposed to the contaminated poop water three times over.

Right.

And a lot of people at this point say, well, why can't we just treat the water with chlorine or with, you know, whatever standard?

But cyclospora is a really tricky bug because this parasite is really resilient and those standard techniques don't kill cyclospora.

We don't have any reason to believe that that's what's happening.

I mean, cyclospora does not pass from person to person.

And that's how you end up with people standing in the produce section of their grocery store saying, I'm not buying any lettuce.

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