CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The Typhus Rats of Los Angeles.
In 2018, it was clear that L.A. had a serious problem. For much of the early 2000s, the county recorded just a handful of flea-borne typhus cases each year; in 2009, for example, it saw just nine. But in 2018, L.A. battled multiple localized typhus outbreaks, marking a watershed moment for public health officials in the county.
The outbreaks started in the summer. Between July and September, the county identified nine typhus cases linked to downtown. All of them required hospitalization, and six of the nine sufferers had either been homeless or lived in transitional housing. In October, public health officials noted an additional outbreak in the Willowbrook neighborhood, near Compton. By year’s end, L.A. had seen 109 cases of typhus countywide—a record high.
The concern wasn’t just that cases were on the rise, but also where they were being discovered. In the past, the county might have seen occasional, geographically dispersed infections. Now, it was dealing with multiple clusters in dense, urban environments. A document we obtained via public-records requests shows that officials believed “rats and rat fleas” were “contributing to infection” in the county’s cities.
The situation that year was so bad that the city government couldn’t even keep its own employees safe. At the time, Elizabeth Greenwood was a deputy city attorney. One day at work, Greenwood said her shin began to hurt. When she inspected her leg, she noticed some small insect bites but thought nothing of it. Within weeks, Greenwood was reportedly “gravely ill” and suffering from a severe headache, dizziness so bad she couldn’t walk to the restroom unattended, and a 102-degree fever. “It felt like somebody was driving railroad stakes through my eyes and out the back of my neck,” Greenwood said.
Eventually, Greenwood would be diagnosed with typhus. She blamed the city for her contracting the disease, claiming that its failure to clean up garbage and human feces outside City Hall East had “recklessly endanger[ed] the public.” After Greenwood went public with her story, Los Angeles officials admitted that City Hall was infested with vermin. “The rotting trash and the raw sewage is the soup that grows typhus,” Greenwood said.
Documents we obtained via a public-records request show that Greenwood wasn’t the only municipal employee complaining about rats around that time. In 2020, Raul Cabrera, the LAFD captain for Station 6, wrote an email to a city employee complaining that his fire station was being overrun by rats from a homeless encampment.
A homeless encampment, you say?
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