Dr. Byron Chaves

speaker

97 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 17 Jul

Dr. Byron Chaves’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 Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · Hold the lettuce: Updates on the 'explosive' cyclospora outbreak · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

Hey, happy to be here.

Thanks for the invite.

So not quite yet.

We actually have today probably more questions than we did yesterday.

Well, with this new development that lettuce might be implicated, then, you know, we have a number of other questions about how did contamination happen?

Is this really a single source?

Is potentially Taco Bell the only retail chain that is involved?

Is any of this lettuce in the market right now?

Yeah, it probably means what we've been thinking about for the last couple of months, almost.

It seems like this outbreak has been lingering for forever.

But that there's actually more than one outbreak happening at the same time, right?

So we finally have a lead about a proportion of the cases that might be associated with consumption of contaminated lettuce.

But that doesn't mean that there are not other outbreaks happening simultaneously.

And like you mentioned, there's five states associated with the lettuce one, but there's many other states.

There's 34 states where people have reported getting sick, including New York.

And so there might be a series of outbreaks happening.

You know, I would be cautious about pointing towards a specific source right now, because, you know, as of Friday morning, I think it's too early to tell exactly where this is coming from.

Now, what I would say is that cyclospora, it's not what we would typically call an environmental organism in food processing, right?

So when the lettuce is getting shredded in a food facility and mixed with a lot of other lettuce coming from different places, it's

It's not like this microbe is surviving in the processing environment.

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