other discussions
 

TLDR Health Canada > CDC+FDA. Don't eat American produce if you don't wanna poop your pants.

By February 2026, USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service had lost 913 staff, while the Food and Nutrition Service lost 564. The agency’s National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection was also axed. All told, more than 20,000 workers left USDA last year.

Cyclosporiasis is caused by Cyclospora cayetanensis, a single-celled parasite that lives exclusively in humans and causes particularly violent and long-lasting diarrhea. Infection is almost always through ingesting food or water contaminated with feces containing cyclospora oocysts; these take many days to become infectious, so person-to-person transmission is very unlikely.

In an American context, cyclosporiasis outbreaks are almost always caused by improper sanitation at farms or food processing facilities. Farmers around the world routinely refuse to provide adequate toilet or handwashing facilities for their workers if they think they can get away with it, to save money.

PS:

IMO we're going to see quality control issues in every single American export. I would be extremely wary of using medications or medical devices produced in the USA. With no government entities enforcing regulations we have to assume corners will be cut at the expense of quality and safety.

 

A big problem for trust in government is that high-quality governance is usually invisible. When the various agencies designed to protect the American people from all manner of threats are working perfectly, most potential disasters are detected and prevented before they happen. A lot of highly trained government workers do diligent and difficult work for little pay and less recognition, heading off crisis after crisis, and the ignorant swing-voting layman assumes that all his tax dollars are being squandered.

So one hopes that the voting public is learning a hard—or I should say watery—lesson about how important good government is, by way of the manifold consequences of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert Kennedy hacking away at American state capacity. The latest consequence can be heard in the groaning emanating from thousands of bathrooms across the country: the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history. It deserves a name, so I’m calling it the MAHA Trots.

 

A big problem for trust in government is that high-quality governance is usually invisible. When the various agencies designed to protect the American people from all manner of threats are working perfectly, most potential disasters are detected and prevented before they happen. A lot of highly trained government workers do diligent and difficult work for little pay and less recognition, heading off crisis after crisis, and the ignorant swing-voting layman assumes that all his tax dollars are being squandered.

So one hopes that the voting public is learning a hard—or I should say watery—lesson about how important good government is, by way of the manifold consequences of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert Kennedy hacking away at American state capacity. The latest consequence can be heard in the groaning emanating from thousands of bathrooms across the country: the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history. It deserves a name, so I’m calling it the MAHA Trots.