Misery in the Epicenter of Cyclospora: 'A Baseball Bat to Your Abdomen'

Thousands of people across the Midwest have become seriously ill after eating shredded lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants. Health officials linked the outbreak to a tiny parasite called cyclospora, which was found on iceberg lettuce grown and shredded in Mexico. Monroe County, Michigan, has reported one of the highest rates of infection in the country, making it what doctors call the epicenter of the outbreak. The sick lettuce was supplied to Taco Bell by a company called Taylor Farms, which has now recalled lettuce sent to 27 states.

Sherry Dommer, 49, lives outside a small village called Maybee, Michigan, where she grows her own food and keeps bees and ducks. She never expected to get sick from something she ate at a restaurant. But one day last month, she took her 17-year-old son into town for a haircut, and he wanted to stop at Taco Bell. She ordered a Crunchy Taco Supreme, and just a few days later, her body began to revolt in a very unpleasant way.

Dommer described violent stomach cramps, exhaustion, and nausea that would not stop. She said there were times she could not even get out of the shower before needing to rush to the bathroom. Her son also got sick, and for weeks their home felt like a place of constant misery. She eventually went to an urgent care clinic, where a doctor asked her to bring back a stool sample for testing.

Other people in Monroe County shared similar stories of suffering. Nathan Gaynier, a local engineer, said the pain felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to his stomach, and he dealt with symptoms for 10 days. A nurse named Nicole Goodman, 44, said she even had to wear a diaper to work while being treated with antibiotics. She said it was something she had never experienced or seen in any of her patients before.

One of the most serious cases involved Abigail LaMonde, a court reporter who lives in a county next to Monroe. She is 12 weeks pregnant and became so ill that she feared she might lose her baby, throwing up as many as 20 times in just a few hours. When her husband came home one Friday afternoon, he found her passed out on the bathroom floor and rushed her to the emergency room. She had not been able to eat solid food for weeks after first getting sick.

Lab workers at ProMedica, a hospital group in the region, have been running tests around the clock to keep up with a huge number of stool samples. About 550 samples were backed up, and technicians worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to process them all. A lab worker named Robin Fink, 31, moved quickly from sample to sample using gloved hands. She slid cartridges into a beeping testing machine and handed results to her colleagues one after another.

Dr. Brian Kaminski, a top doctor at ProMedica, said the test results were alarming — about 60% of the samples were coming back positive for the parasite. That means more than half of the people being tested were infected with cyclospora. That high number made him realize his area was at the center of the outbreak. As a precaution, he went home and threw away several containers of mixed greens from his own family's refrigerator.

Taco Bell has responded by removing the affected lettuce from all of its restaurants nationwide. A company spokesperson said the problem was an industry-wide issue, meaning other restaurants and grocery stores may also be affected. The Food and Drug Administration said it was still investigating which other places might be linked to the tainted lettuce. Hundreds of people have been hospitalized, and pharmacies in Monroe County have been filled with people seeking treatment.

Life in Monroe County has changed because of the outbreak, and the parking lots at local Taco Bell restaurants that were once busy are now often nearly empty. The sickness has become the main topic of conversation around town, replacing talk of local controversies and weather. Late one Friday night, a Taco Bell employee warned each customer through the drive-thru intercom that tacos would be served without lettuce for the time being. Even though many people have made jokes about the embarrassing symptoms, the suffering caused by this tiny parasite has been very real.