Michigan is ground zero for the twin public health crises wreaking havoc in the US. The state has had some of the most polluted air on Earth due to Canadian wildfire smoke last week while it also has the highest number of cyclosporiasis cases in the country.
These in-your-face (and sometimes in-your-gut) problems, says senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, help make a complex topic—the need to invest in public health infrastructure—extremely easy to talk about with voters. And he has unique qualifications to do so as a MD-PhD who’s served as the health officer for Detroit.
“Do you like eating lettuce? I do. I don’t like the idea because we DOGE’d our whole service that keeps the lettuce safe,” El-Sayed says, referring to how the Department of Government Efficiency downsized the federal lab that tests for cyclosporiasis last year. “Now, everybody’s trying to dodge the lettuce. And if you don’t, then you’re stuck on a toilet for the next five days. That sucks.”
El-Sayed is locked in a tight Democratic primary for Michigan’s open senatorial seat. He’s received support from big-name progressives: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallied with him in Grand Rapids over the weekend, while Senator Elizabeth Warren endorsed him on Monday. In her endorsement, Warren said El-Sayed was someone who would fight “the same billionaires and special interests that have rigged our economy against working people.” For El-Sayed, that includes addressing election spending.
“A lot of this, in the end, comes back to getting money out of politics,” he says. “A lot of these changes in regulations are about massive food companies being like, well, those regulations are too much. We can enforce them ourselves. I’m like, can you? How come you didn’t fix the poop lettuce?”
WIRED caught up with El-Sayed to chat about how he’d fix the public health problems facing his state and why we shouldn’t accept that “poop lettuce” is our new normal.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
WIRED: How have the past few weeks been for you personally, with this one-two punch of public health crises?
Abdul El-Sayed: I don’t know what happened, but for four days I got taken out—I didn’t get tested, because I was on the campaign trail, but I think it was [cyclosporiasis]. If you can imagine campaigning, it was miserable. It was actually my wife who was like, you probably got this.
And then for the past week or so, we’ve been really worried about air quality. I try to stay active—I do a lot of biking—and I’ve been choosing to stay inside. You do more harm than good exercising outside with this kind of air quality.
You shouldn’t have to be dodging lettuce everywhere you go and then unknowingly getting the runs because you didn’t dodge the lettuce. Step back and ask yourself if any of this is normal.
You’ve had a lot of experience handling crises like these at the local and state level. What would you do in the Senate, especially given an administration that has been taking away funding and staff and the basic tools of public health, like peer-reviewed science and public data?
I’d love to be able to haul up leaders at the EPA, the CDC, and the FDA [to testify before Congress]. I want to investigate exactly how our food supply got compromised, how decisions were made at the CDC. Why are their counts so far behind? For the vast majority of people, cyclosporiasis is not a deadly outcome—but imagine what happens when the same infrastructure has to deal with something that really is. What are we going to do then?