Los Angeles County Public Health officially declares Hepatitis A outbreak
Hepatitis A claims 16th life in San Diego; other California cities brace for local outbreaks.
I recently noted that San Diego has officially declared a Hepatitis A emergency. Hepatitis A is an illness that is spread by contact with an infected person’s feces.
Since that initial report, a 16th person has succumbed to the disease and it has been revealed that the city had been warned repeatedly that a disease outbreak was likely to occur unless shortages in sanitation accommodations were addressed.
A San Diego Union-Tribune review of public records found that since 2000, four grand jury reports emphasized the risks of human waste on city streets and a shortage of toilets available for use by the city’s growing homeless population.
One such report, filed in 2010, explicitly warned that an outbreak of illness caused by such unsanitary conditions “could result in liability to the city.”
Each of the reports called on the city to either add more all-hours, publicly available restrooms or bolster its street-cleaning regimen to ensure the public would not be exposed to human waste.
Health officials say such exposure helped fuel San Diego’s growing outbreak, which has left 16 people dead and more than 300 hospitalized.
The grand jury referenced above is a civil watchdog panel of 19 citizens, which investigates issues pertaining to local government and citizen complaints only.
Now, Los Angeles County public health authorities have officially declared an outbreak after nearly one dozen confirmed cases were recorded in the region.
Case numbers are still small in L.A. County, with only 10 people infected as part of the outbreak, said Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the L.A. County Department of Public Health. By comparison, almost 450 people have contracted the virus in San Diego.
Ferrer said the department is ramping up prevention efforts locally so more people don’t get sick. San Diego’s outbreak has already spread to Santa Cruz, where 69 people have been diagnosed.
…Ferrer said L.A. health workers will inspect homeless encampments in Los Angeles to improve sanitation, while spreading the word about improved hygiene. The city of Los Angeles is already cleaning the streets on skid row with bleach, a practice San Diego adopted earlier this month in an effort to reduce disease transmission.
Additionally, Santa Cruz has reported over 60 cases of the disease and public health agencies are struggling to deal with the transient nature of those being infected.
“The reason we’re particularly concerned (now) is because we have an outbreak in San Diego and we have an outbreak in Santa Cruz, and the contagion is in a population not easily contained,” said Dr. Sharon Balter, the chief of the department’s communicable disease control program.
The county typically sees about 40 to 60 cases of hepatitis A annually from the population at large, with a concentration often found among food-service workers. But those patients can be readily tracked and follow-up can be scheduled by phone or email, something that’s not possible when patients are living on the street.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall on our report about San Francisco’s “Poop Map”, an online reference people use to avoid human feces on the street. Not surprisingly, then, city officials are bracing for their own outbreak.
San Francisco, by comparison, has seen 13 confirmed cases so far this year, none of them fatal, according to health department spokesman Brent Andrew.
…Andrew said the city is working to increase the vaccination rates among adults and educate people about the need for hygiene.
“We’re doing quite a bit of outreach to the homeless population,” Andrew said, noting that this involved both homeless outreach workers and also healthcare workers encouraging people who come in for other matters to get vaccinated.
The city’s Public Works also has three crews dedicated to steam cleaning areas around homeless encampments and other locations that draw regular complaints about human waste.
It is often said that California is the Petri dish for failed progressive policies. It certainly appears that the analogy is apt.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Here in California the question is: Are we living in a third-world shithole, or a first-world shithole?
the answer is yes
what will be interesting is how quickly our ‘betters’ who employ the illegals come down with this illness.
i do not wish this on anyone, BUT with an OPENBORDERS mindset i am sure there will be more of such cross border immigrants.
Immigrants, legal or not, and especially those who are gainfully employed, have nothing to do with this. They have homes and toilets, and are therefore not the problem. as the post says, the problem is homeless americans, who have nowhere to do their business except the street, so they do it there and spread the virus.
“Immigrants, legal or not,…have nothing to do with this”
Don’t say “nothing”: Public health inspectors have long known that immigrants (or immigrants of certain backgrounds) can be a health problem, partly by bringing diseases with them but mostly by being ignorant of modern sanitation practices and even of scorning such practices.
The post says nothing about homeless Americans. Nothing.
Hep A and other diseases imported with Illegal Aliens
Thank LA’s mayor (a grossly incompetent liberal idiot) Eric “Hepatitis” Garcetti.
L.A Mayor is a certified idiot and nobody notices:
https://truthaccordingtotom.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/l-a-mayor-is-a-certified-idiot-and-nobody-notices/
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson on blacklivesmatter and Eric Garcetti:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SHS5II54xs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AahzCLmSnMw
Garcetti is on the heels of the other idiot mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villarigossa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9LxT6krtqw
Hopefully, Garcetti will be first to get hepatitis.
“Hepatitis A is an illness that is spread by contact with an infected person’s feces…”
The democrat media should be awfully careful from now on how it handles obama’s soiled media diaper.
…just another good reason not to visit that dump…
What ever happened to vagrancy laws? Public sanitation laws? I’m sure there must be a legal way to deal with this situation quickly and effectively if the authorities had the political willpower.
It may be a hate crime, here, to suggest that an illegal immigrant is a vagrant.
Suggesting anything isn’t a crime, and therefore by definition can’t be a hate crime. But most bums are not immigrants, let alone illegal ones.
But vagrancy laws are unconstitutional and a historical curiosity. I’m only surprised it took the courts so long to recognise this.
“vagrancy laws are unconstitutional”
How do you feel about individual citizens using legal means to make bums feel unwelcome and uncomfortable? That they are likely to be constantly insulted and chased off until they clean up their acts?
Maybe now cities are relearning why the squatters cannot be permitted to make cities dangerous places to live. Sanitation is not optional.
Vagrancy laws? Where have you been? Those were always obviously unconstitutional, and were finally struck down decades ago.
Public sanitation laws can only be enforced if there are facilities where these people can go legally. If they have nowhere else to go, it’s obviously unconstitutional to prosecute them for doing it in the only place available to them.
When I went to live in India I got Hep A/B shots before departure. Perhaps I’d better check on whether I need booster shots before visiting my siblings in LA.
Hepatitis A is an illness that is spread by contact with an infected person’s feces.
There are many diseases which spread among human populations this way. HAV isn’t even one of the most common ones.
I wonder which contagions they haven’t announced. I think we can be reasonably certain that if they have HAV, they have others too, and probably have had them for a while.
Maybe, but Hep A is one of the easier ones to catch, so it’s bound to be more common. Even in normal places there are Hep A cases now and then, and occasional outbreaks, whereas when’s the last time you heard of even one case of cholera in a normal place?
Even the “best” restaurants employ Illegal Aliens in the food prep areas, that’s how you wind up dead.
Legal aliens can also be a problem: People who cannot see any reason to wash their hands after taking a dump, who think that food dropped in a pile of feces should be cooked and served rather than thrown away, who think that rules for refrigerating food are useless. And who sometimes loudly complain that such rules are created only to oppress brown people.