The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services said Friday that the state has had five confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis so far in 2026, and that none are linked to outbreaks nationwide.
The federal government has identified the likely source of the outbreaks in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia as iceberg lettuce from a supplier to Taco Bell, though the Food and Drug Administration said that clusters of cases in other states may or may not be associated.
“We expect that the number of people who are tested for, and identified to have, cyclosporiasis will rise in the coming weeks due to increased national attention and recommendations for healthcare providers,” a spokesperson for the state health department said. The spokesperson said the state will provide updated cyclosporiasis case counts on Tuesdays.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends hand washing and thorough cleaning of raw fruits and vegetables.
As news of the cyclosporiasis outbreak spread, Chris LaValley, owner of LaValley Farms in Hooksett, said he started getting emails from concerned customers about whether the parasite was in their food. The outbreak is also leading customers to seek more information about the farm’s practices — if they use organic practices, what manure and fertilizer they use and if they use GMO seeds.
“People asking a lot of questions about our growing practices and how we're growing, how we're producing,” LaValley said. “Even regular customers, that our CSA members are sending emails kind of asking, ‘Oh, I don't know why I've never asked this before?’”
Essentially, he said, he tells them that LaValley Farms is run on a sustainable business practice meant to work over generations, including using chicken manure to treat the vegetable fields from their own hens in combination with fertilizer, and growing a hybrid of GMOs and heirloom vegetables.
Managing two fields of blueberries — one in New Hampshire, the other in New Jersey — LaValley said people have asked him if the fields in New Jersey are safe from the outbreak.
His response? He said he eats them, along with his kids and his staff.
“We're small, hands on, constantly consuming everything that we're selling here,” LaValley said. “If there was ever a problem that came about in our production cycle, or any small business cycle like that, they would know about it firsthand because it's not being passed from place to place to place.”
One challenge LaValley faces is that he has seen increased demand, but he plans crops for a customer base months in advance.
“Like right now you want corn from me, right? You're excited. Well, this is corn that I planned last November and December,” he said. “These were all plans that I had to make seven, eight, nine months ago.”
Julie Davenson, executive director of Northeast Organic Farming Association, said the cyclosporiasis outbreak raises concerns about food safety and agricultural systems.
“When we hear about these recalls it can happen, absolutely, local farms are not immune to it, but it's often these larger farms that are operating on a large scale,” Davenson said. “All it takes is one point of contamination that can contaminate large amounts of produce.”
Federal food regulations have protocols of how farmers are supposed to wash and handle produce but Davenson said smaller farms can be exempt.
Danielle Allen is a farmer and the owner of Root 5 Farms in Fairlee, Vermont, on the border with New Hampshire. She wanted to address concerns her customers might have about the outbreak with them directly, so Allen wrote a newsletter to customers of the farm about their practices, to provide a level of transparency and traceability to the food they produced.
“The biggest thing I wanted to demonstrate for people is that when they're buying from a small local farm, they have that relationship with their farmer,” Allen said.
In the farm’s letter, Allen told customers that the farm goes through annual well water testing, that they go through daily cleaning and sanitizing efforts.
“We have a really strict policy of staying home when you're sick,” Allen said. “Everything we learned from COVID of isolating and masking, and we provide paid sick days for people to be able to have that ability to stay home when they're sick.”
Allen grows about eight acres of vegetables a year on 40 total acres, and sells roughly 400 Community Supported Agriculture boxes a year. She said the farm is 40 acres so they can build soil nutrition and rotate fields for pest and disease control.
“Many farms our scale have these food safety systems in place,” she said. “This isn't like a reactive thing, but more just that we have these as our everyday practices. We take very seriously the idea that we are handling, growing and handling food that people eat.”
