Sibylla Bostoniensis

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[Previously: ALERT: Cyclosporiasis Outbreak Nationwide]

There's a subtle fault I've noticed about how a lot of people are thinking about Cyclospora, the organism causing the outbreak of cyclosporiasis.

People, such as over on Reddit, keep talking about Cyclospora as something that is found in soil. Which is true – but how do you think it get there?

I think the problem is that people think of feces, which is what Cyclospora oocysts are found in, as something that stays where you put it. They think of feces as a solid.

But if cyclosporiasis teaches us anything, it is that feces are not necessarily a solid.

In fact, when you're talking about infectious disease and public health in the US, you should be thinking of feces as a fluid. Not because people sometimes have diarrhea, but because here people always flush it down toilets. With water. Making sewage.

Overwhelmingly, like in 99.99% of cases, in our society, what we do to manage solid human waste is make it into a liquid. Immediately, at point of contact with the waste management system, whatever it might be where we encounter it.

Consequently, the vast majority of fecal contamination events are not the product of some person dumping solid feces where they don't belong, but sewage escaping containment, as fluids are wont to do.

How did the feces get on the field or into the factory? Probably by flowing down hill. Or seeping through a crack. Or being pumped to the surface. Or being sprayed from a tank.

The papers I linked to previously reported on various findings suggesting that Cyclospora species were more prevalent in water supplies in some areas after high rains. One way that could be happening is that rivers and lakes leaping their banks in high rains can overwhelmed usual waste management systems, whether that's an outhouse or a pumping station – and send sewage through a community, and into their fields.

Do not dare to imagine this is a thing that only happens in developing countries and could not happen in our industrialized society. This is a phenomenon that should be familiar to anyone in the North Camberville-East Arlington area: it's precisely why Alewife Brook so often smells like shit after high rains and Somerville sends out an email warning, "Public health officials recommend avoiding contact with water bodies during rainstorms and for 48 hours afterwards". One of the reasons that flood water is dangerous, even when it's not moving too fast, is because it is often foul from flooding the sewers and can be infectious.

In places in the US that don't have city sewer and water, there's a whole industry organized around the eternal project of keeping home owners from poisoning themselves (and landlords from poisoning their tenants) by keeping septic systems separated from water wells. It exists because H2O in downright magical in its ability to elude human control, and also modern Americans can be terrible at appreciating the danger and plausibility of fecal contamination of their water supply. (Q.v.: 1, 2, 3, etc.)

All the following scenarios are plausible:

• Barracks or offices for a farm has a septic system which is leaking into a well used for irrigation.


• A sewer pipe is just straight up leaking into a field of produce, possibly bubbling up from underneath.


• A water treatment plant has had a fault and is discharging inadequately treated sewage into a waterway which isn't used for drinking water, but is used for irrigation.


• Water used in the washing of produce in a packaged food production plant is contaminated because the well got contaminated by a leak in their own sewer line.


• Contaminated flood waters washed over a farm's fields months prior to planting.

The likelihood of all of these scenarios are exacerbated by factors we all are hopefully well aware of:

• Climate change has resulted in localized extreme rainfalls resulting in flooding, even more than has been historical, and we've always had plenty of floods in the US.


• US federal terrorism of immigrants has hit the agricultural sector and left it short handed, which means problems are less likely to be noticed just from the lack of experienced workers with eyes on the fields.


• Supply chain issues due to Covid, tariffs, and war with Iran resulted in difficulty sourcing building supplies, mechanical parts, agricultural fertilizers, and maybe (rumor) waste water treatment chemicals, all of which might lead to under-maintained waste water systems (domestic, industrial, or civil), or to failures due to inferior resources like ineffective or contaminated materials or supplies.


• The housing shortage has resulted in widespread dropping of the practice of making sales contingent on home inspections, which was one of the primary social forces motivating homeowners to maintain their private wells and septic systems.


• The economic squeeze of the middle class means homeowners are less likely to keep up with all home repairs, including of sewage systems.


• Federal funding cuts to the USDA, EPA, and other oversight agencies likely have emboldened corporate agriculture to cut more corners and run more risks, including with hygeine.


• Water shortages due to climate change and due to rising industrial use like AI data centers may be driving farms in some areas to recourse to alternative, less safe water sources.

That's just off the top of my head; there's probably a dozen more that aren't leaping to mind.

Now I don't mean to suggest that the only way you should mentally model human feces is as a fluid. When sewage dries in the open air, it can also become a dust which is picked up by the wind. (Last year, the guy runing CIDRAP hypothesized from the map of bird flu detections in poultry farms in one area, that windborne bird feces was how it was disseminating between farms.)

And yes, it is possible that people could literally put human feces in crop fields, whether it's agricultural workers denied adequate sanitary facilities or some idiot deliberately using "humanuer".

But when you think about the question of how human waste might have gotten into a crop, the first model you should entertain is that it flowed downhill.

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