This week on Uncanny Valley, the team discusses the details behind Apple suing OpenAI over alleged stolen hardware secrets. And the company’s headaches don’t stop there—a group of OpenAI employees just started a Super PAC to advocate for stronger AI guardrails. Plus, New York’s first-in-the-nation data center moratorium draws Donald Trump’s ire, DOGE stonewalls FOIA requests on its AI use at HUD, and WIRED’s Emily Mullin explains the cyclosporiasis outbreak spreading across more than 30 states.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
Apple Is Suing OpenAI for Allegedly Stealing Hardware SecretsOpenAI Staffers Are Funding a Rival Super PAC to Take on Their BossNew York Governor Signs First Statewide Data Center MoratoriumDOGE Used AI for Housing Policy. The Government Won’t Say HowThe Explosive Diarrhea Outbreak Is About to Get Much Bigger
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript #
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.
Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
Zoë Schiffer: This week we're discussing OpenAI's ongoing drama, both legal and reputational. Last Friday, Apple sued the company basically alleging that OpenAI has been stealing confidential hardware secrets. And now this week, WIRED learned that some OpenAI employees are launching a super PAC to push for AI guardrails. We'll get into all those details and whether these developments could further hurt OpenAI, particularly in its fight against Anthropic.
Brian Barrett: Also on the AI front, this week, New York State officially passed the first statewide data center moratorium. We'll dive into what that means exactly and whether this move could pave the way for other states to follow suit.
Leah Feiger: We'll also talk about how some members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, used AI to actually shape housing policy. And we're going to check in on the disease sweeping the nation, cyclosporiasis, which is causing "turbo diarrhea" across the country.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay, you guys, I'm really excited to start with this OpenAI drama because the company has been in the headlines a lot lately and not for fantastic reasons. So basically what happened was last Friday, Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for allegedly stealing information like unreleased iPhone parts and prototypes, confidential designs, documents about secret projects. That accusation sucks for OpenAI. It's pretty intense, but it gets really messy because Apple is basically saying that this theft, this alleged theft, mostly happened through former employees. OpenAI's chief hardware officer, Tang Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple is named in the lawsuit and accused of encouraging people who are leaving Apple to bring with them proprietary information and unreleased technology. You guys, Brian, I'm so curious what you thought when this dropped.
Brian Barrett: I think it's fascinating. There's a lot of really interesting accusations in there. I think it's also like it's part of Apple's playbook that we haven't seen in a while, but it is something that Apple has done or threatened to do before. Tony Fadell, who is a longtime Apple guy, but then went on to start Nest, the thermostat company. He had also, I think he told a story recently in the wake of all this about how when he had started Nest, he hired several hundred Apple employees. Steve Jobs called him, threatened to sue, scream bloody murder. But what I though Fidel said was interesting, and I don't know that it applies directly here, but reportedly what he says is that he said, "It's my job to hire great people. It's your job to keep them."
Zoë Schiffer: I forget that Apple is a pretty litigious company. They've famously sued employees for supposedly leaking stuff or taking proprietary stuff with them when they left Apple, which companies will do occasionally, but particularly for leaks, it is rare to see lawsuits come. But this is the area that I feel like Apple cares most about. It is so secretive about its products that when that stuff starts to get out of its hands, I think they really are quick to jump on it. My take here, and Leah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts, is that this isn't about getting damages from OpenAI. I think what Apple actually wants is to slow down OpenAI's hardware ambitions because it's really continuing—Apple is continuing to go all in on the iPhone as the primary computing platform for the AI era. And I do think that if we see an audio-first platform that works better for stuff where you do not need to look at a screen and you can just talk to an agent, that could be intimidating for them.
Brian Barrett: I think this is what's interesting to me too is some reporting came out this week also about what the device is eventually going to look like from Bloomberg and said it's going to be like a speaker. It's going to have some motorized elements so it'll move in some capacity. Reece Rogers, I hope he doesn't mind my sharing, said it sounded like a Furby, which I think is probably right. But look, if OpenAI is banking on hardware, I am skeptical. I feel like ultimately Apple can still make a speaker. And also because Apple is a more neutral party in all this, Apple can make a speaker that has a few different AI options to choose from potentially or has Siri AI, which is blown from Gemini. And ultimately, I do think it's going to come down to the device that you use most of the time is going to be the phone.
Zoë Schiffer: Well, I mean, that has been true for a long time. And I think we've seen even Apple try and get away from this very screen heavy life that we're all living with the face computer. The name is escaping me.
Brian Barrett: Vision Pro.
Zoë Schiffer: The Vision Pro. Thank you so much.
Brian Barrett: You don't think about Vision Pro every day?
Zoë Schiffer: No. I have to say that it lived and died very quickly, and I haven't thought about it since. But I think the issue, and this has been true for other AI hardware the devices, like the famous pin from Humane AI and all of that. There just are many things that are better to do on a screen, and I don't think that's going to change. However, if you can get agents and voice mode that works really, really well, there are other things that you really could just ask an agent to execute for you, and you might prefer not to look at a screen the whole time. And so I personally, as someone who has a very tortured relationship with my screens, I'm ready for something that could work a little bit better. But it's hard to execute correctly, and I don't think we've seen a product so far that has been able to do that. Just to ground what we're talking about a little bit more, OpenAI has hired more than 400 former Apple employees according to the lawsuit.
Leah Feiger: Wow.
Zoë Schiffer: And last year it paid $6.5 billion to acquire a startup called IO Products that was co-founded by longtime Apple executives, including Tan, Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey, and the most famous person, Jony Ive.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, it is a huge investment that they're making in this space, and it's obviously got a sting for Apple to be losing all of these people. Plus they've lost AI researchers to other companies as well. Apple's hemorrhaging AI talent and now hardware talent too, which really hits them where it hurts. What I am most excited about about this whole process is we're not even really there yet, is that lawsuits mean discovery, and—
Zoë Schiffer: Yay.
Brian Barrett: Yay, discovery, yay. And discovery means we're going to get to read so many emails of these companies talking trash about each other and themselves. And it's going to be such a delight. It's always a joy when these things happen.
Zoë Schiffer: It's so fun. No one is cattier than a lawyer with an IP issue.
Brian Barrett: Put that on a mug, Zoë.
Zoë Schiffer: They are.
Brian Barrett: Wow. Do we have merch yet? Can that be on—
Zoë Schiffer: I love it.
Brian Barrett: That's our merch. Yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: That's our merch.
Brian Barrett: OpenAI's headaches are not just limited to the Apple lawsuit this week. WIRED learned that OpenAI staffers are funding a rival super PAC to advocate for tighter regulations on Frontier AI Labs. It's a rival, of course, to all of the money that people like Greg Brockman, OpenAI executive, and others have put towards boosting AI and shutting down guardrails. This new Super PAC called Guardrails Alliance, catchy. It launched last month.
Zoë Schiffer: Sounds like an insurance plan.
Brian Barrett: It does. And not one that you necessarily want to sign up for. It's like the only one that'll give you a mortgage. It launched last month with $5 million in initial funding. It bills itself as a populist effort by tech workers, labor unions, and other groups. And here's the key aspect. It's going to be a counterweight to that $100 million Leading the Future fund that we talked about a second ago.
Zoë Schiffer: Right. The way you said five million, it was like five million was a lot. And I was like, it seems like it.
Brian Barrett: I'm trying to hype up, I mean, they need—it’s Guardrails Alliance. They need a little bit of a boost.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, no, they do. I have been kind of waiting for this moment, I will say, since we found out that Greg Brockman was donating so much money to MAGA and Trump related causes in his view and Maxwell Zeff, WIRED reporter, has reported on this pretty extensively. It's really all about boosting AI and AI policy. And I think his view and the view of many others in the industry is that Trump and those aligned with him are more favorable toward a growth at all costs, AI first policy agenda. But if you've talked to any average researcher, overwhelmingly the companies are filled with younger employees who are pretty liberal. And so that tension felt potentially really messy to me. And OpenAI still has a culture where people are willing to push back and speak out. If you look at their Slack, it has that earlier tech feel of people really working out the problems in public, even though this stuff does tend to leak so much. At the same time, the composition of the company is really changing. There are these newer employees that have been brought in over the past year or two. I've heard some employees call them the MAGA blondes. I honestly don't even know if they are blonde or MAGA oriented, but I think there's this feeling that OpenAI is really changing, and there is the Trump aligned contingent. And then there's the more liberal contingent.
Leah Feiger: Look, this is so much to me the grassroots versus the billionaire, but it's all from within the same company, which is—we talk about Silicon Valley sometimes as a monolith, but it is so clearly not a monolith. You have so many different people at different rungs. And I was really taken with the fact that one of the largest donors was a research engineer. He gave 200K, research engineer Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe, and he gave 200K and has spent years working on the company strategies for mitigating potential societal harms caused by AI. I would love to see a performance review of him after all of this is done. And I actually really do wonder if people are nervous about this. Are there stopgaps, Zoë, at these kinds of companies to prevent perhaps a more Trump aligned manager from taking it out on a more liberal coded person, especially when this is playing out financially in political races and will certainly have impact?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, look, OpenAI is a relatively mature company. It has processes. It has an HR department. It's not to say this stuff can't happen. I absolutely can and we've seen it happen before. But I think until it becomes a major issue, until we see this fight actually impact the work and OpenAI's ability to ship new models, frankly, I think they're going to go with the line of, "We have an open culture, people are allowed to disagree, this is totally fine." And they'll try and spin it almost as a positive and we'll see.
Brian Barrett: Leah, my question for you is $5 million in the grand scheme of things, not a lot of money. They have a larger goal to raise $15 million during the election cycle. What can they reasonably expect to accomplish with that kind of money? If you were them, how would you go about spending it? What's the actual potential? You mentioned impact. What does that look like in practice probably?
Leah Feiger: That's a really good question. And I mean, I'd be remiss to not also call out the other PAC that was started by employees from Anthropic that's also trying to combat Leading the Future. It's called Public First Action. They have something like $20 million. So there is other funding. There are other people in the AI space that are kind of making moves against the Greg Brockmans of the world. But again, when you're talking about what does that bring us to? 25 million versus 100 million, that's obviously still a massive difference. To me, this says that they need to be working on down-ballot local campaigns. You can honestly get a lot of bang for your buck in smaller states with less expenditures. Honestly, as we're talking about some of the big races right now, the races that everyone wants to talk about are Texas and Maine. And there are, without a doubt, very expensive ad buys to be had. But when you're talking about the state of Maine, for example, there's a lot of local volunteer power that would be very, very interested in getting involved for very, very cheap. And local organizations that are also able to mobilize again, very cheaply. Radio spots in Maine versus radio spots in Austin, there are different capacities here. So to me, what this really says, and we're not going to—I mean, actually I can't say because I don't know exactly who all of their political advisors are at this moment, but this is really going to come down to advisory staff. Are they being told to get into the biggest races in New York and what have you? They shouldn't. Like, yeah, absolutely. Make your thoughts known, especially when you're talking about AI regulation, New York data centers, all of these different things. But if you want to have some of these bigger moments and movements, you got to go down ballot. And so I'm curious to see how this goes. And to me, this is also going to say, is this a play for notoriety? Is this a way to say, look, there's a bunch of OpenAI employees that don't agree with you? Or is this a way to actually impact races and perhaps turn Senate blue? We'll see.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. That's a good point. In some ways it's as if not more important to be really vocal and visible saying, "Hey, we don't all think the same about this." Yeah, regardless of the outcome and the money behind it.
Leah Feiger: Speaking of AI in politics, I'm going to talk about one of my favorite topics as always, DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, started by Elon Musk. It's still in the news, and it is in the news for a very specific reason for us this week, which is we can't get more news out about it. Members of DOGE who are working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, used AI to inform policy decisions. This is something that we were reporting on and figured out last year, but now the agency appears to be denying Freedom of Information Act requests for information on the development and the use of the AI tools and the way they actually informed these policy decisions. This all came out according to documents obtained by a FOIA request from Democracy Forward, which is a nonprofit legal organization. And it's pretty concerning. You would assume that a year after some of this dust has settled, that we'd be able to get a little bit more information. And from government agency to government agency, HUD really is the latest example here. We've been just getting tons of stonewalling on additional further details as to what DOGE has been up to, the access they had, the materials they used. It's very much about the fact that they used AI, but it's also how did they use AI? What is still left in the systems? And what were the regulations there? What got blown by? Who knew about this? And these are so many important details that are just missing. And especially now as people are going back and trying to untangle the spaghetti web that was left in their steed. It's very frustrating for employees, understandably, and frankly should be frustrating for anyone who is going to be impacted by housing policy in the next 20 years in America.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, I think it speaks to an issue that we're all grappling with, which is AI tools can be used in ways that are very legitimate and helpful. If you told me that they were using AI for research and checking their sources, I would be like, "Seems smart, cool." And then it can be used in ways that are possibly introducing discrimination. It could be used in ways that some would call cheating. And I think the just huge range and the types of tools available, they create a lot of questions, and questions that I would say the public is entitled to some form of answers on. But like you said, right now we're being a little bit stonewalled.
Leah Feiger: You're 100 percent right, Zoë. And in this specific case, HUD employees who spoke to WIRED at the time that this all was coming out found that these DOGE employees were using AI to identify agency rules for potential rescission or contract cancellations. And this was happening across government. But again, I just want to be so clear about what this means as they were saying, "Here's this massive list of contracts. What do you think we should cut here?" And just kind of like, "Let's see what happens." Again, we don't have more details on everything that got cut, the way that it got cut, the way that it all went down, what we're missing now as a result. It's all still coming together and that makes it so much more unfortunate. And especially when you're also thinking about the people that were doing this, that were actually employing the AI. WIRED had reported that Christopher Sweet, who was then a third year student at the University of Chicago, was one of the people really involved in this effort, as was Scott Langmack, who came to DOGE from a property technology startup called Kukun. So it's not like these were people who were, A, even necessarily that well versed in government work by any means. But then additionally, the idea of going through massive government contract lists with AI and being like, "Yep, good to go."
Brian Barrett: I do need to say for those who love creative company spellings, that's Kukun, K-U-K-U-N.
Leah Feiger: No.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it is.
Brian Barrett: It is. So they're claiming this AI exemption, right? They're saying like, "Oh, we can't possibly release these to you because it was AI, and AI is exempted from FOIA," which is not the case. But I guess a two-parter, Leah, what are the implications of that? Are we seeing it beyond HUD or other agencies going to embrace this? And what's the next step? Do we go to the courts with this? Not we, but do people go to the courts with this to fight this?
Leah Feiger: I mean, great question. Probably. If this is information that the American public wants to know, if this is information that Democracy Forward decides is worth their time, there is no AI exemption under FOIA. AI talking to people and AI talking to each other is not privileged communications, which is the argument that was being made here. There are no laws in the US that require the government to disclose if AI has been used in the creation of rules, policies, or regulation. And so simultaneously, a FOIA like this is the only way that you would find out. And saying that there is this AI exemption then just creates an entire black box.
Zoë Schiffer: I would say also that it's not just how they used the tools, but how the tools made the decisions that they made because anyone who's used AI agents at all knows that you can't just say, "Identify regulations that we should potentially do X, Y, Z too." You have to give them a lot of context. And then even then it's very important to interrogate the tools and say, "How did you make that decision?" So you can understand what the AI is taking into account and what it's ignoring? These tools are not completely neutral. They are built by humans. They have biases baked in. And I would sincerely hope, but I don't have that much hope, that DOGE was looking at all of that and not just unleashing AI on these systems willy-nilly.
Leah Feiger: 100 percent.
Brian Barrett: Zoë, how much hope do you actually—
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, no.
Leah Feiger: The last thing I want to leave you guys with of this too is that Lang Mac of the aforementioned property technology startup Kukun, he's now the executive director of deregulation AI at the Office of Management and Budget, which falls under the executive office of the president, according to his LinkedIn. So it's not like this person has now disappeared into obscurity and his decision-making or we actually don't know a ton about his decision-making because they won't tell us. It gets to continue being in this black box, which is again, just to say that it very much felt like DOGE swept in and swept out in the same wave of the year, but that's really not the case. The people that got very involved and entrenched these policies from the beginning are still not just in government, but officially in government, entrenched, serious roles, pay scales, etc. And it's a story we're paying really, really close attention to. And big ups to a senior reporter, Victoria Elliot, for staying in the weeds on this for us.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay. One more AI story. So New York became the first state in the country to impose a statewide moratorium on building new data centers. The moratorium was signed as an executive order by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and it puts into place a one-year on the development of large-scale data centers while the state develops new environmental and energy grid standards.
Kathy Hochul, archival audio: The bottom line is progress shouldn't arrive with a higher utility bill, depleted water supply, or noise pollution. So we have no choice but to address these challenges created by these massive facilities. That is why today I'll be signing the nation's first ever statewide moratorium on hyper scale data centers.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay. Well, there's a few caveats to just point out, and then I want to hear what you guys have to say. One, this moratorium applies only to large scale data centers, so 50 megawatts or more, and it doesn't affect facilities that have already started construction or have existing permits. And it'll also lift once the state finalizes a generic environmental and impact statement. So that could be a year or more out. The thing that I want to say is that I feel like there are two stories that this moratorium is wrestling with. There's the national story, which is we actually need AI in this country. It's a big part of our economy, and it's like in some ways the big bet we have taken. We don't have a lot else it feels like right now. And then-
Leah Feiger: I mean, EVs are done, so this is it.
Zoë Schiffer: Boy. And then there's the local story, which is it is very uncomfortable and it frankly sucks to live near a data center. It does spike your energy bill. It does suck up a lot of water. And those things are going to continue being intention.
Leah Feiger: I have to bring this up because data centers right now on a large scale are unpopular. They're just ultimately unpopular. I feel like every other headline is like, "And this community is rebelling against this and this community is rebelling against this." Other states have tried and failed to actually pass a similar moratorium. So I'm kind of curious how New York's is going to go. And I also have to tell you guys that I was, before we recorded this podcast, which we record on Wednesdays, this is going to be released to you all on Thursday morning. I was refreshing Truth Social, convinced that Trump was going to weigh in. I was absolutely positive and he did. At 12:39, Trump weighs in and goes, "One of the biggest driving forces in the future for jobs are data centers." Just imagine a lot of random capitalization in there, "They are big, strong, bold and money machines for the state in which they are built. Governor Kathy Hochul, for political reasons, has terminated all data centers being built or to be built in New York State. "These companies are now being sought in Alabama, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and many other states, but the taxes and the job amount to liquid gold. New York State has made a terrible decision-"
Zoë Schiffer: That's—
Brian Barrett: It's not true.
Zoë Schiffer: —not true.
Brian Barrett: Not true.
Leah Feiger: He continues and continues and continues. I mean, from the political side of all this, and I know that there is so much we need to unpack with the tech and the climate and everything, whoever told Donald Trump that data centers was going to be his winning issue for midterms, I want to be in a room with them. It's incredible.
Brian Barrett: I'm really surprised because as Zoë and I both muttered while you were saying that he's wrong. His arguments are wrong. There is an argument he could make, similar to what Zoë made. It's right in his wheelhouse. It's an America first argument. It is that it is crucial. AI is the next space race. We need to beat China. We need data centers to do that. Ask not what you can do for your country.
Leah Feiger: He gets there in the end.
Brian Barrett: Wait, other way around. Other way around.
Leah Feiger: By the end, he gets there. "The radical left 'dumbocrats' must not be allowed to cause us to lose data centers, AI and all of this incredible new technology to China and other countries, President Donald J. Trump." He does get there again, however, littered with errors and also I think missing a really key part of his electorate that is not just in blue states that's going, how on earth am I supposed to pay for this and live with this?
Zoë Schiffer: Right. I mean, that is the issue. And we've seen other states pass regulations. Ultimately, this is my take. I think we need to focus on making data centers safer, better, less impactful to the communities that they're near. We need to put them in areas that aren't directly adjacent to where people are living as much as we're able. We need to make them less energy intensive to the extent that we are able. I personally would say a blanket moratorium, which again, that's not exactly what this is, but is a mistake just because of how dependent the entire economy is on AI right now and how important these AI data centers continue to be for the AI race and boom.
Brian Barrett: I disagree. I think the carve outs here make sense. You still build anything up to 50 megawatts. You can still build some pretty decent sized mega centers. The data center is not huge, use, but you can get a pretty good data center. And look, someone's building a data center 10 miles from my house. It's going to be pretty big. It's going to be right next to where the animal shelter was going to move. It's bad. And to have watched that process, it happened before anybody realized it was happening. And I think that's the story that's true a lot of places in this country whereas a community, these deals were made a while ago or when they do happen, you don't necessarily know until the permitting's done that this is even coming in. So I do think some sort of , some sort of moratorium, some sort of restrictions on until we sort of figure out, A, way to inform people what's going on, B, a better plan of attack for where these things go and the impact they'll have. And again, I have a dog in this fight, so I'm not saying I'm an unbiased perspective here.
Zoë Schiffer: Well, no, I think that that's a fair point to make. I will just say talking to a lot of industry people, it really surprises me how constrained startups feel in particular by compute. You hear about SpaceX, OpenAI, these places that have a lot of access to data centers, a lot of access to computers. Everyone else is fighting tooth and nail to get access, and they need a lot more than they're currently able to get. It makes me a little less stressed about AI bubble talk because I'm like, I don't know. If you're in Silicon Valley at least, it still just feels like the appetite is enormous. Brian, I can see you taking a big sigh.
Brian Barrett: No, no, no. Yes, always. But no, I did want to, before we move on, because I want to make sure I asked Leah a question, which is that this is shaping up at least to me to be a real issue in the midterms, at least in some places. And I want to know, want your sense of— But also what's interesting about it to me too is it doesn't seem necessarily, despite Trump's post, that clearly divided among party lines. How is this going to play out? It feels like it'll be an issue I don't know for who or where or how.
Leah Feiger: The reason I was clicking refresh on Truth Social is because I'd had a government source tell me that this was a priority of President Trump's going forward. And I wasn't 100 percent sure if that was going to actually bear out. Sorry to my source if you're listening, just because this has, like you said, this has really been a not down the line issue. You have Republicans and Democrats that have been opposing data centers in their communities asking for reform, asking for moratoriums. Again, because community impact is just community impact, whether it's a blue state or a red state.
Brian Barrett: Coming up after the break, we'll be diving into the cyclosporiasis illness outbreak. That's the nicest possible way I can put it that has a lot of people wondering whether they should skip that salad for lunch. Stay with us.
Leah Feiger: This next story is not for the faint of stomach, but it's an important public health story. So bear with us. The US is in the middle of its worst outbreak on record of a nasty parasitic infection called cyclosporiasis, which causes explosive weeks long diarrhea. It is spreading fast with cases now confirmed in more than 30 states and to break down what's actually going on, what officials know and still don't know. And where we're going from here, we're joined by WIRED's Emily Mullin. Emily, thank you so much for being here.
Emily Mullin: Hello. I'm sorry to be here on this occasion.
Leah Feiger: Could you just start by explaining what cyclospora is and why this year's outbreak is being called the worst on record?
Emily Mullin: Yeah. So there's no good way to talk about this, and I apologize to Zoë and our listeners. Cyclospora is a microscopic parasite that causes pretty bad intestinal illness and the illness is called cyclosporiasis. So people get it by consuming food or water that's contaminated with this parasite. The CDC suspects there may be close to 7,000 cases already nationwide. Michigan makes up the bulk of those, and on Wednesday, their case count was just updated to more than 3,700 cases. Just for context, in a typical year, states might report a handful of cases to a few dozens. So this is really unusual. The actual case count is almost certainly higher. Both the CDC and outside experts have said this, and it's because most people don't seek medical care when they get diarrhea. We're not all going out and calling our doctors about our bathroom habits. And even when they do, labs don't routinely test for this parasite. But now that there's awareness about it out there, if you do have symptoms, you should definitely be asking your doctor to get tested specifically for this.
Leah Feiger: I mean, I have to say there's diarrhea, and there's diarrhea. What we're hearing this cause is just like something—no, no, no. I need everyone to really understand this is so much more than that. This isn't like a couple of bad bowel movements. I heard accounts of one man who said that he was on the toilet 40 times in one day. This is beyond what a casual bout would do to a human.
Emily Mullin: Yeah. So this is not like a one and done type of thing. This can be days, possibly up to a week or two of diarrhea. And one of the big concerns with this prolonged diarrhea is dehydration. So people should just be aware of that if they think they have symptoms of this and just keep hydrated. One of the things that experts say is that if you are older, if you are immunocompromised, if you are particularly at risk for severe dehydration, you should really be concerned about this and be on the lookout for dehydration.
Brian Barrett: Emily, the cause is kind of a mystery still too, right? I've heard people say tainted lettuce could be a culprit, but also maybe raw fruits and produce. All the things that are supposed to be good for you are now this. Is there any food that's safer than not? What should people look out for? Do we even know yet?
Emily Mullin: We do not know the exact source of the outbreak right now. The CDC is still investigating several food products, although Michigan health officials have said that lettuce keeps coming up as a common product during their investigation. And just in general, we know that lettuce and leafy greens are a common source of other foodborne illnesses. We know that romaine lettuce, for instance, always linked to E. Coli outbreaks, salmonella. Other leafy greens are linked to norovirus. So it would not really be a surprise if lettuce does end up being the culprit here. And one of the reasons lettuce is problematic is because it's eaten raw. You don't hear about disease outbreaks from Brussels sprouts because we cook them. Another reason is that lettuce and other leafy greens have these small folds and crevices that make it difficult to wash off pathogens completely.
Zoë Schiffer: So how do you get rid of it then?
Emily Mullin: Yeah. Well, this is a great question because the cyclospora parasite is resistant to bleach and chlorine and also vinegar does not kill it. So one thing you should know is that if you're buying the bagged lettuce that says it's pre-washed, still wash it. This parasite is very good at latching onto the surfaces of fruits and vegetables. So right now you really need to get in there and give your greens a good scrub. You should be scrubbing down all of your raw vegetables, but especially lettuce.
Leah Feiger: That is great news for those of us who are avoiding lettuce this summer and just really leaning into fried food that you-
Zoë Schiffer: Leah-wide moratorium on lettuce of any sort.
Leah Feiger: Leah-wide moratorium, 100 percent. I feel like we can't really talk about this without talking about government cuts in the healthcare space. You reported on CDC's FoodNet cutbacks last year. The HHS has pushed back a bit on the idea that these kinds of funding cuts are to blame. They've said that this reporting has continued throughout their systems, etc., etc. To what extent though do cuts actually play a role? Can we blame DOGE for how bad this has gotten? Please let me blame DOGE for how bad this has gotten.
Brian Barrett: Can we coin the phrase DOGErrhea perhaps?
Zoë Schiffer: I was going to say we should replace the word diarrhea with Cocoon just to be funny, but I felt like it was a little too obscure.
Leah Feiger: I'll circle you guys. Thank you so much.
Emily Mullin: So a former CDC official told the Washington Post that FoodNet was not designed for this real time outbreak detection or response. Its function is more in tracking longer term trends. But I think the bigger issue here is the huge staffing cuts we've seen to the CDC. We reported last year that about a quarter of the CDC has been cut under this administration, and that is going to have ripple effects across all of public health. So in this situation, it means fewer people conducting outbreak investigations which can really hamper response efforts.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay. So for people who are listening right now, perhaps me among them, what is the actual practical guidance? Should people be avoiding salads? Should we be avoiding lettuce altogether?
Emily Mullin: I mean, my personal opinion about salads, you probably don't want to hear, but I think there are more nutritious vegetables out there. I'm just saying.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh my gosh. We need a whole other podcast on that.
Emily Mullin: I mean, if you're buying lettuce, you should be scrubbing it clean. I think in terms of eating at home versus out, maybe you don't eat salads out because you just don't know what the cleaning process was like. And if you trust yourself to do that more, then I would say yeah. Still go for the salad if you like salad. If you want to risk it, that's up to you.
Brian Barrett: You can still eat as much ranch dressing as you want. And to me, that's what a salad is. So I think we're fine.
Emily Mullin: Absolutely.
Leah Feiger: Emily, thank you so much for joining us today. This was the best.
Emily Mullin: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Pran Bandi, who's also our New York studio engineer. It was fact checked by Matt Giles and Daniel Roman. Marc Leyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED's Global Editorial Director.