Los Angeles officials have pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars and created a dedicated taskforce to fight an outbreak of typhus, as a city of glittering wealth grapples with a disease linked to intense poverty.
“We’re deploying every available resource to help control and stop this outbreak,” said Alex Comisar, press secretary for Los Angeles’s mayor, Eric Garcetti.
Many of those resources have focused on the city’s large homeless population, considered most at risk for contracting the flea-borne illness. This same time last year, California’s homeless population was threatened by an outbreak of hepatitis A, another disease associated with impoverishment and poor sanitation, which killed 21 people and infected hundreds.
There have been 64 cases of typhus reported across Los Angeles county so far this year, more than the 53 cases recorded this time last year, and on track to surpass the 67 cases diagnosed last year total. A department of public health spokesperson said the outbreak began with 11 cases of typhus in downtown Los Angeles, six of which were diagnosed in people who were homeless. Unlike hepatitis A, the form of typhus typically found in California is not usually fatal and can’t be passed from person to person.
According to the most recent count, 53,000 people are homeless across Los Angeles county, many of them in the downtown neighborhood of Skid Row. The streets of Skid Row are lined with tents and sometimes strewn with trash.
Chronic sickness and hospitalization is common among the residents of Skid Row, many of whom have been forced into the streets by the city’s soaring rents and lack of affordable housing. Homeless residents have no choice but to live in close proximity to rats and other rodents, putting the homeless and their pets especially at risk for flea exposure and typhus. The lack of access to toilets and places to wash up can also help the spread of disease.
Sean Gregory, a Skid Row resident who works at a hygiene center in the neighborhood, said they closed down for a couple of hours so the showers and other facilities could be treated with anti-pest spray. But he, like other local people, said he had not heard much about the outbreak.
“It doesn’t seem that bad down here. I’ve seen no sign of it,” Gregory said. “I saw something on Facebook about it. I didn’t open up the link.”
Dr Timothy Brewer, a professor of medicine, epidemiology, and public health at UCLA, said: “It’s an uncommon disease.” He said in his six years of practicing medicine in Los Angeles, he had seen one confirmed case of typhus.
Some people may not even know they have it. The common symptoms are headache, fever, and sometimes a rash, and they will often go away within a week or two, even without treatment, he said.
The likelihood that the average person would contract typhus – if they don’t have an indoor-outdoor pet or live in proximity to an animal with fleas – is vanishingly low. For the most part, it is the city’s very poorest, living under bridges or in tents, who bear the most risk.
Los Angeles county voted this week to approve an emergency plan that would arm outreach workers with typhus-prevention tools like insect repellent and flea collars. The city has pledged to spend $300,000 on expanded clean-ups of homeless encampments.
The city has also pledged to expand and “intensify” a regular program of clean-up sweeps it already conducts in Skid Row, called “Operation Healthy Streets”. But the sweeps are controversial. Homeless advocates have repeatedly sued the city over its clean-up methods, alleging that police and sanitation officers regularly confiscate or ruin homeless people’s belongings.