As Americans cook their vegetables to at least 158°F to kill a diarrheal parasite that has sickened over 24,000 people and killed two this summer, one US Senator is turning up the heat on Health Secretary Robert F. Kenney Jr. over the government's "calamitous response" to the record outbreak.

In a letter sent Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called the federal response to the Cyclospora outbreak "botched" and "marred by missteps." She pointedly questioned whether corruption and incompetence within the Trump administration and its clear ties to Taylor Farms—the mammoth produce distributer that sold Mexican-grown iceberg lettuce linked to the outbreak—played a role in the federal government's failures.

"[P]olitical contributions and direct White House lobbying from Taylor Farms... raise urgent questions about the role this influence-peddling may have played in loosening federal food safety oversight and hampering the federal government’s response to the outbreak," Warren wrote in the letter.

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As cancer treatments have advanced and outcomes have improved, one aspect of cancer care in the US has consistently worsened over the last decade: the wait time for surgery.

According to a study in JAMA Surgery, patients with one of six types of cancer—breast, colon, lung, pancreatic, gastric, and esophageal—have faced longer wait times for surgery than in 2012. Timeliness is considered a core metric of healthcare quality, and delays in cancer surgery have been linked to poorer outcomes, including reduced survival rates and increased patient anxiety and distress.

The findings of the new study are based on data from over 2.7 million patients who had been diagnosed with non-metastatic stage I–III cancers requiring surgery between 2012 and 2023. Researchers led by cancer expert Timothy Donahue at the University of California, Los Angeles, broke that time frame up into four groups: 2012–2015, 2016–2019, 2020–2021, and 2022–2023 to see how wait times have changed over the period.

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