The Typhus Rats of Los Angeles

Rats have been with us since the beginning. For thousands of years, wherever humans settled land, built cities, or crossed oceans, rats were never far behind, constructing a civilization of their own beneath our feet.  

In Los Angeles County (L.A.), rats abound. You may see only an occasional rat dart across an alley or root through a restaurant dumpster, but make no mistake: they are everywhere, from Skid Row to Koreatown, from Boyle Heights to Santa Monica. They are always nearby, even if sometimes out of sight: scurrying in storm drains, walls, crawl spaces, and alleyways.

Rats, and the fleas that live on them, can be carriers of deadly diseases—including, most notably, the plague, which, in bubonic form, killed tens of millions of people and laid waste to cities in the Middle Ages. In L.A., however, the main concern is a different medieval disease: typhus.

Since 2009, the number of flea-borne typhus cases in L.A. has increased by a staggering 2,300 percent. 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.

This City Journal investigation—based on interviews with leading rodent experts, on-the-ground reporting, and a review of hundreds of pages of documents obtained via public-records requests—reveals that Los Angeles County has allowed a disease once associated with the Middle Ages to terrorize a major metropolis.

In L.A., 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 Los Angeles, the rats are everywhere.

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.

“This encampment , which I believe you are aware of, is located on both the city and county side,” Cabrera wrote. “The Fire Station is being overrun by rats coming from the encampment directly across the street. We were hoping not only for regularly scheduled clean up but also a more permanent solution . . . . 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.”

The records we obtained make clear that 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. L.A.’s battle with typhus—a disease often associated with cramped and unsanitary living conditions—continued to spiral out of control.

In 2022, L.A. suffered more typhus outbreaks, marking another turning point in the county’s fight against the disease. That year, L.A. 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, L.A. would see 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 percent 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 Los Angeles’s rat population has increased in the aftermath of the pandemic but also that its rats have become more aggressive.

“The most aggressive were surviving through that time,” Sked said. “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. And that actually created a trend where we’re now seeing more presence, not just in total numbers, but observations where [the rats are] actually more willing to come out and interact in ways that 10 years ago we didn’t see that much.”

Today, Los Angeles has all the necessary conditions that allow a rat population to thrive. On a recent reporting trip to the city, we saw those conditions up close. In Skid Row, for example, we spoke with several homeless people who told us that seeing large and aggressive rats in the area is a common occurrence.

“Some of them are gangster, too,” one man said.

Another told us that he’d seen a rat eating through the bandage of an injured man while he was asleep. “The rat chewed off the bandage he had, and literally the flesh off him, eating the dead flesh off his arm,” he said.

In Koreatown, we found a large rat burrow under a sidewalk near a homeless encampment. At dusk, a horde of rats could be seen scurrying among the trash littered on the sidewalk, feasting on leftover food.

A few blocks away, during an interview with Niamh Quinn, the human-wildlife interactions advisor for the University of California’s agriculture and natural resources division, we came across an entire city block where the sidewalk was covered in open, unbagged trash. “What this is, is a lot of harborage,” Quinn said. “This is a lot of places for rats to hide, so this is not good.”

Shortly after, a municipal bus driver stopped in the road and opened the door to her vehicle. The driver told us that she has submitted several complaints to the city to have that sidewalk cleaned up—to no avail. Quinn said that in situations like Los Angeles’s, where the city fails to provide basic services effectively, it becomes almost impossible for citizens to keep themselves and their homes protected via private pest control.

“If you look where we are right now, [all these buildings] might have private pest control,” Quinn said. “But then 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. Municipal management would help fill in these holes. You wouldn’t have all of these gaps that are potential reservoirs of rodents that are invading into all of these other spaces that are managed.”

In other words, in Los Angeles, in 2026, thinking that private pest control can keep you safe from rats is a bit like thinking you can bail water out of a sinking ship faster than it pours in through multiple holes.

This year, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health provided an update—obtained via public-records request—on its typhus-surveillance efforts. In the presentation, public health officials admit that the “increasing volume of cases is quickly exceeding capacity to investigate and respond,” and note 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 Governor Gavin Newsom signed A.B. 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 A.B. 2552, further expanding those restrictions.

Sked argues that those changes have made urban rat control significantly more difficult—including in L.A., 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 Los Angeles 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, L.A. announced yet another flea-borne typhus outbreak, this time in the Pico-Union neighborhood, where five people have been hospitalized so far this year.

We reached out to Governor Newsom’s office, Mayor Bass’s office, and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health for comment. Newsom’s office did not offer a responsive comment. The mayor’s office asked if we had reached out to the county, and the county public-health department pointed us to their July press release.

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.