Rats, and the fleas that live on them, can be carriers of deadly diseases — including typhus, a bacteria-borne, fever-like illness that is rocking LA.
Since 2009, the number of flea-borne typhus cases in LA has increased by a staggering 2,300%. Last year, the county recorded more cases than at any point in its history. Some patients have died. Behind the scenes, the authorities responsible for protecting the public admit that they lack the resources they need to get the situation under control.
The rats, meantime, spread disease in predictable ways. They feed on trash, fleas feed on those rats, and the infected fleas bite people, who in turn suffer anything from a mild illness treatable with antibiotics to a sickness that ends in death.
Crumbling infrastructure, a homelessness crisis, garbage-ridden streets, ineffective rodent control, and state restrictions on popular rodenticides have combined to enable the spread of a medieval disease.
Whether you see them or merely pass by as they furrow in the dark, one thing is clear: In LA, the rats are everywhere.
In 2018, it was clear that LA 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, LA 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. By year’s end, LA had recorded 109 cases of typhus countywide — a record high.
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, LA 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 city officials complaining that his fire station was being overrun by rats from a homeless encampment.
By 2019, local officials had a good idea of what steps needed to be taken to get the rat population under control: more garbage cans, cleaner streets, and flea control. But in the years that followed, the situation apparently went from bad to worse.
In 2022, LA saw 171 cases of flea-borne typhus and noted that its five-year average for typhus cases had doubled. The county also battled multiple simultaneous outbreaks in neighborhoods including Boyle Heights, Eagle Rock, and Glassell Park, and suffered three typhus deaths — the first documented fatalities in decades.
By 2024, LA would report another record high for flea-borne typhus cases: 187. In 2025, that record was broken again, with 220 cases; the county also investigated three localized outbreaks. Local public-health officials noted that some 90% of typhus patients required hospitalization last year.
The city’s rat problem has worsened. In 2025, the pest control company Orkin released its annual list of the most rat-infested major cities in America. That year marked the first time since the list’s inception, more than a decade earlier, that any city other than Chicago had taken the top spot. This time, Orkin named a new location as America’s rattiest city: Los Angeles.
Shannon Sked, national technical director at Orkin, believes not only that LA’s rat population has increased in the aftermath of the pandemic but also that its rats have become more aggressive.
This year, the LA County Department of Public Health provided an update — obtained via public-records request — on its typhus-surveillance efforts. In the presentation, public health officials admitted that the “increasing volume of cases is quickly exceeding capacity to investigate and respond,” and noted that the department receives “no funding specifically for flea-borne typhus related activities.”
To make matters worse, more and more tools are being removed from the pest-control toolbox. In 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1788 into law, sharply restricting the use of potent anticoagulant rat poisons in hopes of protecting “mountain lions and other wildlife.” Four years later, Newsom signed AB 2552, further expanding those restrictions.
Sked argues that those changes have made urban rat control significantly more difficult — including in LA, where the problem may be worse than ever.
“The problem isn’t that there’s regulation,” Sked 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.”
The rats, meantime, appear to be proliferating.
In March, Walker King, deputy district director for LA Councilwoman Nithya Raman, wrote to city officials to complain about “a large amount of rats at an abandoned building in the hills,” according to internal correspondence obtained through a public-records request. King’s email says Raman’s office had already spoken to a public inspector about the issue, but that the inspector was “noncommittal.”
Then, in June, a fire tore through a massive warehouse in Boyle Heights, destroying refrigeration for roughly 85 million pounds of frozen food. In the days that followed, Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency. Residents complained of the overwhelming stench of rotting meat and an army of “giant rats” descending on the warehouse.
Last week, LA announced yet another flea-borne typhus outbreak, this time in the Pico-Union neighborhood, where five people have been hospitalized so far this year.
Individually, each of these incidents might be dismissed as an isolated failure. But taken together, they paint a different picture. A county struggles to keep its streets clean, to keep garbage from piling up, to bring homelessness under control, to contain its growing rat problem, and to prevent medieval diseases from infecting its citizens — all in a state more interested in “mountain lions and other wildlife” than the health of its own people.
At a certain point, like the rats that torment Angelenos, the pattern becomes too overwhelming to ignore.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Ryan Thorpe is a senior investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
