Why Americans Are Eating Parasites Straight Out of the Sewer
A massive parasite outbreak just hit tens of thousands of people across the U.S., and the culprit isn't dirty street food — it's recycled sewage sprayed onto farm fields.
A microscopic gut parasite called Cyclospora has sickened over 22,000 people across America, and the way it spreads is wildly unsettling. This organism lives exclusively in human intestines. When someone gets infected, it exits through the plumbing and heads straight to the municipal wastewater plant.
Here is where things break down: standard sewage treatment uses chlorine, which completely fails to kill these parasite eggs.
Across the country, around 200 billion gallons of that "treated" wastewater are pumped out annually to irrigate agricultural fields. Once sprayed onto crops, the eggs sit in the summer heat for about a week to mature into their infectious form. Then people buy the berries or greens, eat them, and end up back at square one with debilitating stomach bugs.
Hardly any states actively regulate or filter these specific protozoa out of wastewater discharges, effectively turning agricultural irrigation into a self-sustaining loop of human sewage pathogens.
The entire farm-to-table movement somehow forgot to check what was happening between the toilet and the table.
Source: The Conversation
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