Last month, I noted that Los Angeles County reported a record countywide surge in typhus, with 220 confirmed human cases in 2025 and about 90% requiring hospitalization. Furthermore, there were multiple localized “outbreak zones” besides Skid Row, including in Santa Monica.
As a reminder, typhus is a flea-borne disease caused by the bacterium Rickettsia typhi. Fleas become infected when they bite infected animals (like rats who scurry around homeless camps). Once infected, the flea spreads the disease to humans when flea feces are rubbed into the eyes or come into contact with cuts or scrapes on the skin.
Historical documents confirm typhus has been a major killer, especially in times of war or famine. Its mortality rate is 10-15 in untreated cases, and can be as high as 40% in vulnerable populations. It is truly a medieval disease.
Apparently, the only mayoral candidate who has noticed a problem with medieval disease in modern Los Angeles is Scott Pratt.
“The 42-year-old former reality television star addressed the issues Sunday as growing momentum for his independent campaign against Karen Bass and socialist Nithya Raman ahead of the June 2 mayoral election saw unions launch attack ads against him.“My plan is: First three weeks, signs up across the city. No more nakedness, no more drug use, no more robbing, no more dog abuse,” he told the All-In podcast.“Then once we start enforcing laws, boom, the streets will be back.”“People are just living in feces and drug use and dogs burning. We need these streets cleaned,” Pratt added, saying he wanted to bring in the CDC to investigate the ”medieval diseases” in the homeless camps.”
Furthermore, California in 2026 has already seen its highest number of annual measles cases in seven years.
The looming new domestic beachhead for the disease comes as vaccination rates have tumbled nationwide in recent years — in some areas falling well below the herd immunity threshold experts say is necessary to keep it from spreading.“There are pockets of vulnerability, like in communities, that can really lead to outbreaks going wild,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a UC San Francisco infectious diseases expert.So far this year, there have been at least 40 confirmed measles cases in California. That’s well above the 25 recorded in all of 2025, according to Dr. Eric Sergienko, chief of the state Department of Public Health’s communicable disease control division. It’s also already the state’s highest single-year tally since 2019, when there were 73…..The spread of the highly infectious virus is largely occurring among unvaccinated individuals, particularly children and younger adults, state health data show. Of the first 39 measles cases reported this year in California, 95% were among people who were unvaccinated or had an unknown immunization status, and 85% were in individuals under age 20, Sergienko said in a briefing to health professionals this week.
Then, there are the more modern pathogens. Last year, I reported that health officials in Los Angeles County confirmed and investigated possible local transmission of this more severe strain of “mpox“.
There were three individual cases of “Clade I” in the U.S., among people with no history of travel to high-risk areas overseas. While there are currently no additional reports of this strain in Los Angeles recently, “Pride Month” activities loom ahead in June.
What’s striking here isn’t just the reappearance of diseases we associate with the Middle Ages, but the willful blindness of leadership that ignores the source.
While I wish Pratt tons of good luck, containing typhus and other outbreaks won’t hinge on calling in the CDC nearly as much as it will on restoring basic public order. That means ending sprawling homeless encampments, curbing open-air drug use, and reestablishing sanitation standards that any functioning city once took for granted.
In other words, the very steps he’s proposing.
You don’t need a federal task force to tell you that rats, refuse, and unchecked human misery are a breeding ground for disease.
You simply need the political will to stop pretending this is normal.
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