In Mexico’s Guanajuato region, a public thermal-water bathing complex sits roughly 235 meters from a Taylor Farms lettuce processing plant. That distance equals an eight-hundred-foot walk, or about three minutes on foot. The arrangement has existed in plain view since at least 2010, years before federal inspectors arrived in 2013. Today the same area stands at the center of the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak recorded in the United States.
The 2013 Inspection and an Unanswered Question
After Cyclospora sickened hundreds of people in Iowa and Nebraska in late 2013, the FDA conducted an environmental assessment of the Taylor Farms de México facility in Doctor Mora. The resulting report recommended that the company determine whether Cyclospora represented a reasonably likely hazard in the leafy-green growing region. If the hazard existed, the firm was advised to re-evaluate its wash step for salad mix.
Thirteen years later, no public document shows that determination was ever completed. The published assessment described the processing plant and five nearby ranches. It made no mention of the large public bathing facility
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