Elizabeth Greenwood was a deputy city attorney for Los Angeles when she contracted flea-borne typhus inside City Hall. "It felt like somebody was driving railroad stakes through my eyes and out the back of my neck," she told investigators from City Journal. A 102-degree fever. A disease most Americans associate with history textbooks and the Black Death. Contracted in a government office building in the second-largest city in the United States.
She wasn't the only one. Since 2009, flea-borne typhus cases in Los Angeles County have increased by 2,300 percent.
That's not a typo. Nine cases in 2009. A hundred and seventy-one in 2022. A hundred and eighty-seven in 2024. Two hundred and twenty in 2025 — a new record. Three people died from the disease in 2022, the first documented typhus fatalities in LA County since 1993. And 90 percent of patients last year required hospitalization, according to the LA County Department of Public Health.
The rats are everywhere. Skid Row. Koreatown. Boyle Heights. Eagle Rock. Santa Monica. Willowbrook. Orkin — the pest control company — named Los Angeles America's rattiest city in 2025, knocking Chicago off the top spot for the first time in over a decade. Shannon Sked, Orkin's national technical director, explained that COVID lockdowns actually made the problem worse. "The most aggressive were surviving through that time. Restaurants were closed, the food availability was changing. So those that were most willing to go out and search, they were the ones that survived."
So the rats got meaner, hungrier, and more numerous. And on the streets of LA, where homeless encampments pile garbage and raw sewage in open air, they found paradise.
Greenwood — who, remember, caught typhus at her desk — put it plainly: "The rotting trash and the raw sewage is the soup that grows typhus."
LAFD Captain Raul Cabrera, stationed at Fire Station 6, sent a letter begging for help after rats from a nearby homeless encampment began overrunning his firehouse. "We were hoping not only for regularly scheduled clean up but also a more permanent solution," he wrote. "I would like to be proactive in this situation before the rats make a permanent home in the Fire Station or one of our City family members gets sick."
But here's where the story turns from tragedy to farce. Governor Gavin Newsom signed A.B. 1788 in 2020, sharply restricting second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides — the most effective rat poisons available — to protect mountain lions and other wildlife. Then in 2024, he signed A.B. 2552, expanding those restrictions even further. Sacramento decided that protecting mountain lions in the hills was more important than protecting humans in the streets.
Sked, the Orkin expert, was diplomatic about it. "The problem isn't that there's regulation," he said. "The problem is that, in my opinion, the regulation is a bit knee-jerk, and instead of regulating it in a way that we can actually mitigate risks, we're actually regulating out of existence and losing the tool altogether."
Translation: they banned the thing that works.
Niamh Quinn, a human-wildlife interactions advisor at UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, surveyed the urban landscape and pointed to the obvious. "There is literally no management here. There is no management of the landscaping, there is no management of the rodents, and there is no management of the trash."
Meanwhile, the LA County Department of Public Health admitted in its own reporting that "the increasing volume of cases is quickly exceeding capacity to investigate and respond." And in a detail that would be funny if people weren't dying, the department noted it receives "no funding specifically for flea-borne typhus related activities."
A June 2026 warehouse fire in Boyle Heights destroyed refrigeration for approximately 85 million pounds of frozen food. Residents reported an influx of what they called "giant rats" flooding the surrounding neighborhood. Three localized outbreaks were investigated in 2025 alone — Central Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Willowbrook — with five people hospitalized in the Pico-Union neighborhood in a single cluster.
The city that can't pick up its trash now can't kill its rats. The rats carry fleas. The fleas carry typhus. The typhus puts people in hospitals. The hospitals send the bill to taxpayers. And Sacramento keeps signing laws to make sure nobody disrupts the cycle.
That's not a public health failure. That's a governing philosophy.
