Los Angeles County just posted its highest typhus numbers ever recorded.
The disease spreads through rats and fleas, the same combination that gutted cities during the Black Death.
Here is the part Mayor Karen Bass does not want you connecting to her own policies.
A Medieval Disease Making A Modern Comeback
Two hundred twenty. That is how many flea-borne typhus cases Los Angeles County recorded last year, the worst total since the county started counting.
That number is up from 187 cases the year before, and it keeps climbing every single year officials look at it.
Nearly nine out of ten people infected needed hospital care, according to the county's own public health department.
Some patients did not walk away from it. Typhus can spiral into multi-organ failure, and the county's medical epidemiologist, Dr. Aiman Halai, has said as much herself.
Cases are not confined to one bad neighborhood either. Investigators have traced active clusters in Central Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Willowbrook near Compton.
City Journal reported that the county's own internal briefings admit the caseload is "quickly exceeding capacity to investigate and respond."
The department told its own staff it receives no dedicated funding for flea-borne typhus at all, even as the outbreak sets records year after year.
Homeless Encampments And Rat Poison Bans Built This Problem
Rats do not appear out of nowhere. They follow trash, and Los Angeles has spent years accumulating exactly the kind of trash rats love.
Sprawling homeless encampments across the city generate mountains of waste and food debris, and rats have moved in to take full advantage of it.
At the same time California's own government tied the hands of the people whose job is to kill the rats.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed A.B. 1788 in 2020, sharply restricting the anticoagulant poisons that are the most effective tool against large rat populations.
Four years later Newsom signed A.B. 2552, tightening those restrictions even further in the name of protecting mountain lions and other wildlife.
Nobody in Sacramento seems to have weighed that tradeoff against a typhus outbreak now hospitalizing hundreds of Los Angeles residents a year.
A single female rat can produce up to seven litters a year, and her pups can start breeding again within weeks.
Every one of those rats carries its own population of fleas, and every one of those fleas is a potential vector for the bacteria that causes typhus.
Take away the poison, ignore the encampments, and you get exactly what Los Angeles has now: a rat population with nothing standing in its way.
This Has Happened Before, And Nobody Fixed It
Los Angeles has been here before. Two LAPD officers were treated for typhus back in 2019, and one doctor warned at the time that bubonic plague itself was "imminent" in the city.
That warning went unheeded, homeless policy did not change, and here Los Angeles sits in 2026 with a record outbreak of the exact disease everyone should have seen coming.
The county's own numbers tell the story plainly: 141 cases in 2021, 171 in 2022, a brief dip to 124 in 2023, then a steady climb straight back to a new record.
That is not a random spike. That is a trend line pointing in exactly one direction under exactly one set of policies.
Los Angeles has crime, has people leaving in droves, and now has a public health crisis that traces straight back to the same permissive approach to homelessness and the same regulatory war on pest control.
The rats did not create this problem on their own. City Hall built the habitat, Sacramento took away the weapon to fight it, and now Los Angeles residents are the ones paying for it in hospital beds.
Sources:
- Ward Clark, "America's Most Rat-Infested City Now Battles Medieval Disease," RedState, August 5, 2026.
- "The Typhus Rats of Los Angeles," City Journal, August 5, 2026.
- "Public Health Reports All Time High of Flea-Borne Typhus Cases," Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, April 2, 2026.
- "LA County reports record typhus outbreak; 90% hospitalized," Fox 11 Los Angeles, April 3, 2026.
- "Flea-borne typhus surges across LA County with 90% of cases requiring hospitalization," KABC/AOL, 2026.
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