Sanitizing water won't kill it? Not chlorination?

What is cyclospora, anyway? It is not a bacterium or thing that I am familiar with. It is parasitic; it is a eukaryote; beyond those two definitions, it might as well be an alien from Venus because I'm not familiar.

How does it get into produce? Does it seep inside from irrigation? Fall on it in droplets? Grow inside the vegetables, waiting for human host? Where does it come from?

Just how do you protect from it and mitigate it?

By the way, chopped salads and processed produce isn't typically washed at the destination. It's not a good thing to wash a salad you're just about ready to eat. Once I grabbed a "salad spinner" gadget at the thrift store that was supposed to spin the moisture out of a large volume of salad, but if food service set about washing their already-shredded lettuce, we'd have soggy yucky tacos.

Taylor Farms is a very big player in the produce market. Every salad kit I've ever bought has been either Taylor Farms or a store-brand, and I'd wager most of those store-brands are simply Taylor Farms in disguise. To know they were supplying Taco Bell and other food service... they must be real big.

I picked up salad kits at Target. They say Salinas. I believe they are non-Taylor. But there was plenty of Taylor Farm product on the shelves as well, also professing a Salinas origin. I would suppose that we are still dealing with a chiefly Mexican outbreak, and that Salinas, CA is safe for now?

> What is cyclospora, anyway? It is not a bacterium or thing that I am familiar with. It is parasitic; it is a eukaryote; beyond those two definitions, it might as well be an alien from Venus because I'm not familiar.

It's a protist, which is pretty much "miscellaneous eukaryote".

> What is cyclospora, anyway? It is not a bacterium or thing that I am familiar with. It is parasitic; it is a eukaryote; beyond those two definitions, it might as well be an alien from Venus because I'm not familiar.

Eukariotes include animals, plants, fungus, and the protists. As a sibling comment say, protists is a catch all bag for all the other eukaryotes, that include most algae, amebas and a looooooooooooooooooot of different unicelular organism.

In particular the closest relative of cyclospora that <allcaps>I</allcaps> can recognize is the one that causes toxoplasmosis, and more far away the one that cause malaria. But it's a very big and diverse bag, so I'd not extract too many conclusion from that. It also includes a lot of nice behaved things, not everyone is a nasty parasite there, just some of the most famous.

> Sanitizing water won't kill it? Not chlorination?

I guess the chlorine in tap water is not enough, but pure concentrated bleach would kill it. But I'm not sure and it also ruin your salad. Also, I guess enough heat would kill it too, and it also ruin your salad. https://xkcd.com/1217/