Public health has a storytelling problem.
The stories we tell about it usually begin after prevention has already failed.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve written about disease outbreaks, contaminated food and the resurgence of vaccine-preventable illnesses like measles.
Then COVID-19 found every weak point in the American health care system and kept pressing until those weak points gave way, leaving burned-out clinicians and a backlog of care that still lingers.
Those were different stories, but they all arrived at the same place. Each became news only after something meant to protect us had begun to break down.
The deaths of two Michiganders from cyclospora bring us there again.
Cyclospora is a tricky parasite. It can survive in soil and water for weeks, resist many of the methods used to disinfect fresh produce, and move through a national food supply before investigators recognize a common source. This year’s outbreak is the largest the United States has recorded.
Michigan has been at its center, and state officials say responding to it has been made more difficult by funding cuts and diminished communication with federal partners. Public health experts also argue that years of erosion in disease surveillance and food safety enforcement have left the country less able to identify and contain outbreaks before they spread.
Most of us will never know the name of the epidemiologist who recognized the first pattern or the laboratory scientist who connected one unexplained illness to another hundreds of miles away. We don’t see the inspection that prevented contamination or the investigator who recognized a cluster of illnesses before anyone else realized there was one.
Their work dissolves into ordinary life, and that’s how you know it succeeded. Safety has a way of disguising the work that made it possible.
Success that leaves so little evidence of itself is difficult to defend. What people rarely notice is easier to underfund, easier to shrink and easier to dismiss. Prevention methods work so reliably that reliability itself begins to look effortless.
For years, surveillance systems, food inspectors, laboratories and disease detectives absorbed shrinking budgets and growing skepticism while continuing to protect us well enough that most Americans rarely thought about them. We mistook endurance for invincibility, and we assumed the systems that had always caught us would simply go on catching us.
But maintenance is not the same thing as permanence.
COVID taught us what happens when years of strain collide with a once-in-a-century crisis. The cyclosporiasis outbreak is smaller, but it points to the same uncomfortable truth. Systems don’t usually fail all at once. They weaken gradually until one day we stop talking about what they prevented and start counting what they couldn’t.
A society reveals its priorities before catastrophe arrives, in whether it continues to invest in the ordinary work that makes catastrophe less likely.
Maintenance is rarely a story. The cost of neglect almost always is.
Lindsay Kalter is an independent journalist covering health, science and technology. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, National Geographic, Columbia Journalism Review and other publications. She was a 2022–2023 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Cyclospora deaths reveal problem beyond contaminated food | Opinion
Reporting by Lindsay Kalter, The Holland Sentinel / The Holland Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Lindsay Kalter, The Holland Sentinel | USA TODAY Network
