Los Angeles recorded 220 typhus cases in 2025, the highest number ever documented.
You read that correctly. A disease most people associate with the Middle Ages is ripping through one of America's biggest cities, and the county's own health officials admit they can't keep up. Three people are dead. And the paper trail points straight to Sacramento.
Christopher Rufo pulled over 1,000 pages of internal LA County Health Department records through public information requests, as reported here. What those documents reveal is jaw dropping. County officials themselves acknowledged that the "increasing volume of cases is quickly exceeding capacity to investigate and respond." Translation: they're drowning and they know it.
So how did the City of Angels end up battling a plague straight out of a history textbook? Let's connect the dots.
First, homeless encampments have spread across Los Angeles. Not just concentrated on Skid Row anymore, but scattered throughout the entire city. Those camps have become five star resorts for rats. Millions of rodents are breeding underneath streets, inside the camps, and carrying flea-borne typhus to anyone nearby.
Now here's where it gets really spicy. Governor Gavin Newsom signed two separate pieces of legislation that outlawed the most powerful rodenticides on the market. The rat poisons that actually got results? Gone. Not because some brilliant alternative existed. Not because the rodent population was going to voluntarily relocate. Nope. The environmental lobby wanted it, and Newsom delivered.
Rufo summed up the catastrophe perfectly: combine all these ingredients and you get a public health disaster that experts saw coming from miles away.
The chain of failures is almost comically predictable. LA Democrats refuse to clear encampments because they consider it cruel. Garbage and human waste pile up around those sites because complaints from sanitation workers go nowhere. Rats multiply because their most lethal enemy was legislated out of existence. Typhus explodes because the health department lacks both funding and political backing to mount a real response.
Every single link in that disaster chain traces back to a specific policy decision made by California's Democratic leadership.
The fix isn't exactly a mystery either. Remove the encampments, bring back effective rodent control, and properly fund public health operations. Typhus goes away. Keep doing what they're doing? The numbers keep climbing.
Here's the kicker that makes this whole situation even more absurd. Newsom is currently campaigning for the presidency, running on his track record governing California. That record now includes a medieval disease outbreak, an overwhelmed health department, three dead residents, and a self inflicted ban on the very tools that could have prevented the whole mess.
Maybe, just maybe, a governor should demonstrate he can protect his own state from 14th century diseases before pitching himself as the leader of the free world. So far, that bar remains uncleared.
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