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

What is more likely to happen is that the microbe already came with the heads of lettuce that were introduced into processing facilities.

So think about lettuce that got irrigated with contaminated water and stuff like that.

So the more likely cause of direct contamination is irrigation water.

Yeah, you know, epidemiologists are working really, really hard to figure that out themselves.

I think that, again, there's this hypothesis that there's a series of outbreaks that are happening at the same time.

And while some of the cases may be attributed to consumption of contaminated lettuce, there could be other cases associated with either recreational water or potentially other foods that are happening across the country.

I think that there's multiple hypotheses and recreational waters, despite what the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services is saying, has been implicated in outbreaks of cyclosporiasis.

And there's evidence, documented evidence from other places in the world, right?

Maybe there's untreated wastewater.

or semi-treated wastewater that ended up in recreational lakes and such.

And because we're seeing so many thousands of cases, that it is a possibility that recreational waters could have contributed to some of those cases.

Now, the other thing that we have seen

is there's no reported cases in Canada, right?

And so I do wonder, you know, what's happening across the lakes when people in Detroit and other places in the country here are getting sick and no Canadians are getting sick, right?

So that will also give us a little bit of a hint as to what foods were distributed in the US that were not potentially distributed to Canada.

And we can potentially start narrowing this down.

You know, I would also be cautious about that.

I think that by the loss of life, the outbreak or outbreaks would have happened anyway, right?

I think that what we are missing here is a little bit of connection between the CDC and other federal agencies.

and state governments.

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