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

explosive bowel movement.

But the diarrhea will be, we describe that as watery diarrhea.

That is a better term for that.

Yeah, that is a phenomenal question and a phenomenal mystery as well.

Now, you know, back salads is a product of convenience and a product of we want produce year round and we want accessibility to things.

And that is great.

Now, when we bring any raw agricultural commodity from a farm into a processing operation, there is a chance that that raw agricultural commodity like lettuce may be contaminated with something, right?

There's obviously on-farm food safety practices that are followed, but there's always chances.

Now, one of the things that happens here is that

hundreds of heads of lettuce are being mixed and cut and chopped and placed into packages, right?

So we have a variety of heads of lettuce that come from either a single source or multiple farms, increasing the chances that there could be cross-contamination, right?

So even if only a proportion of the lettuce that came into that process and operation is contaminated, then when we chop it and mix it, then everything is just going to be contaminated.

You know, if I had an answer for that, I wouldn't be a culture professor.

I would be a billionaire.

But I think, you know, people are working really, really hard on finding alternatives for what we currently have.

Now, what we currently have is things like chlorine, right?

Chlorinated water where produce is immersed.

But that is not effective for research.

pathogens like Cyclospora, it is effective for things like E. coli and Salmonella, right, which are bacterial foodborne pathogens.

But Cyclospora is a very hardy organism when we find it in the environment.

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