YouTube Screenshot You might think that our current era could be labeled as the Information Age or the Digital Age. However, according to the New Yorker you would be wrong since apparently they consider this to be the "Age of Explosive Diarrhea." I kid you not. In fact that was what appeared in the very title of their Thursday tale of woe by Jessica Winter, "Grocery Shopping in the Age of Explosive Diarrhea."First Winter describes the dire scene on the explosive diarrhea battlefront:On July 10th, a friend sent me a text message that spoke for an anxious nation. “What if I have the explosive-diarrhea disease?” she asked. She included a link to an article about a parasitic illness, called cyclosporiasis, that was spreading across multiple states, mostly clustered around the Great Lakes region. The outbreak in Michigan, which was the most afflicted state by far, had begun in May and was up to nearly a thousand cases (compared with fifty in a typical year). Confusingly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s nationwide tally of confirmed cases was just a hundred and forty-five—an order of magnitude less than the number reported in Michigan alone.Within an hour of receiving my friend’s text, I had forty-eight cyclosporiasis-related tabs open on my laptop. Cyclospora, I learned, is a protozoan parasite found in produce that has been tainted with human feces—perhaps because heavy rains flooded the porta-potties on the farm where the produce was grown, or because it was irrigated or washed with contaminated water. The cyclospora parasite travels inside an oocyst, a sturdy pod that can find purchase in the nooks and crannies of berries or cling to the ridges and folds of certain greens—and it will die there only if cooked. Once these oocysts reach the human digestive tract, the outer coating dissolves and the parasite unleashes a Visigoth invasion of the small intestine, causing nausea, cramping, and what has been described as “watery diarrhea,” “relentless diarrhea,” and, most vividly, “explosive diarrhea.”And who do you think Winter ultimately blames for this explosive diarrhea outbreak? The answer should be easy since this article was published in the New Yorker. If you haven't yet figured out the all too obvious answer, Winter reveals her idea of the culprit.Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and the hero of the Make America Healthy Again movement, is a gold-standard superspreader of misinformation. But what has characterized his agency’s response to the cyclospora outbreak is the relative absence of information, and that owes partly to an absence of staff. Neither the Food and Drug Administration nor the C.D.C. nor the office of the Surgeon General currently has a Senate-confirmed leader. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency commenced disembowelling the federal civil service, the F.D.A. has lost about twenty per cent of its staff, including food-safety scientists and key support staff for food inspectors. The Department of Agriculture, which regulates poultry and most red meats, has lost about ten per cent of its food-safety-and-inspection team.So there you have it. It is hard to imagine the New Yorker hyping the "Age of Explosive Diarrhea" under the editorship of its legendary editor William Shawn but things have drastically changed since then because of ...Trump. Or specifically crazed liberal reactions to Trump and those who work for him.