Now there’s a headline I thought I’d never write. But hey, we’re living in weird-ass times. Cyclosporiasis is a nasty little son of a bitch parasite that’s causing thousands of people to come down with explosive diarrhea. Like Oppenheimer-level. The stuff of which people will one day write folk songs.Nobody is entirely sure where this latest outbreak started. Investigators are still trying to connect the dots between patients, produce suppliers, and specific foods, but one thing is clear: the U.S. is in the middle of a sizable Cyclospora outbreak, with thousands of confirmed and suspected cases reported across 34 states and Michigan taking the biggest hit. You could swear off salads until Labor Day, but that’s a miserable way to live. While no sink-side ritual can guarantee you’ll dodge Cyclospora, there are smarter ways to handle and prep fresh produce than giving it the world’s laziest rinse.how the hell do you wash a salad?(opens in a new window)OXOGood Grips Salad Spinner(opens in a new window)Available at AmazonBuy Now(opens in a new window)Available at WalmartBuy Now(opens in a new window)Scrubbing an apple underneath the faucet is easy, but when you’ve got a premixed salad in front of you, how the hell do you scrub that? You don’t. Having to hold up each strand of lettuce and brush it individually sounds like some kind of mythic, Ancient Greek punishment.Toss it into a salad spinner. Ordinarily used for mixing up salad ingredients and dressings, it pulls double duty as a way to wash all that loose lettuce at once. There are many from Farberware, Cuisinart, and Amazon Basics, but I like the OXO Good Grips Salad Spinner. All the OXO stuff I’ve had in my kitchen over the years has held up exceptionally well, and their schtick is applying a very grippy rubber coating to the parts you hold, so the salad spins, not you.Buying a head of lettuce instead of pre-chopped salad is the easier way to go, at least when it comes to washing. Tear the outer two or three layers off, toss ’em in the trash, and scrub the rest of it with a vegetable brush under running water in the sink, as you would with a potato. You’ve got to tear up the head and add the other ingredients, though, so it’s not a panacea for everyone who enjoys a salad. You can still buy the premixed bags at the grocery store. Just wash the loose salad mix in the salad washer before digging in.scrub your fruits and veggies(opens in a new window)OXOGood Grips Vegetable Brush(opens in a new window)Available at AmazonBuy Now(opens in a new window)It isn’t just lettuce that’s fallen under suspicion as the vehicle for cyclosporiasis. Raspberries (and other berries) you can toss into the salad spinner for a rinse, but larger items should get the brush.This should be a given already, but if you aren’t yet using a vegetable brush to scrub your produce under water, start now. The bristles will remove more gross stuff than rushing water alone. The OXO Good Grips Vegetable Brush is a good one.Anything that grows in the ground is especially suspect and needs to be brushed, such as potatoes and carrots, more so than, say, a banana. And it’s not a bad idea to wash fresh fruit, too, despite the name being vegetable brush and not produce brush.do you need to use soap?Don’t use soap. Like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, I too know firsthand the effects of having one’s mouth washed out with soap for cursing as a child, along with the gastrointestinal hilarity that ensues after ingesting even trace amounts of it. Rushing water under the kitchen faucet, and plenty of it, will suffice.what is this parasite?Cyclospora cayetanensis is a microscopic parasite that usually spreads through food or water contaminated with human feces, often long before it ever reaches your refrigerator. Once you eat contaminated produce, the parasite can spend anywhere from about two days to two weeks setting up shop in your small intestine before symptoms kick in. By the time it starts invading the cells lining your gut—and the explosive diarrhea begins—you’ll probably have no clue whether it was the cilantro on taco night or the berries you threw into a smoothie last Tuesday.It’s also a notoriously hard parasite to clean. Rinsing isn’t guaranteed to kill it all, although experts say it’ll likely reduce the amount left on the produce, if it’s there to begin with.That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still wash your fruits and vegetables. Absolutely do that.But if you really want to hedge your bets, the one thing that very much destroys cyclosporiasis is heat. That means the most surefire way to avoid cyclosporiasis, if you can live without raw produce for a little while, is to cook all your fruits and veggies.The post Can You Avoid the Watery, Explosive Diarrhea Parasite? appeared first on VICE.