Flea-borne typhus cases in Los Angeles County have increased 2,300 percent since 2009. Last year, the county recorded more cases than at any point in its history.
The disease is spread by fleas. The fleas live on rats. And California banned the poison that kills rats.
Here's how California got here. In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom signed A.B. 1788, restricting anticoagulant rat poisons across the state. Four years later, in 2024, he followed it up with A.B. 2552, which expanded those restrictions even further. The rats, unsurprisingly, took the hint.
As City Journal reported, "In Los Angeles County, 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." And where the rats go, the fleas follow. "Rats, and the fleas that live on them, can be carriers of deadly diseases — including, most notably, the plague."
The plague. As in bubonic plague. As in the disease that wiped out a third of Europe in the 1300s. That one is on the menu now in the second-largest city in the United States, in the year 2026, because Sacramento decided rat poison was the real public health threat.
The biology makes the math even worse. A single rat can produce 6 to 12 pups per litter, with a gestation period of just three weeks. Those pups can breed at five to six weeks old. One pair of rats can produce four to seven litters per year. Remove the primary tool for controlling them, and you don't get a gradual increase — you get a population explosion.
Mayor Karen Bass, for her part, has presided over a city where the homeless encampments that serve as ground zero for the rat population continue to sprawl. The encampments produce garbage. The garbage feeds the rats. The rats carry the fleas. The fleas carry typhus. This is not a complicated chain of causation, which may explain why City Hall hasn't been able to follow it.
Some will point out that A.B. 1788 was meant to protect wildlife — hawks, owls, and mountain lions that eat poisoned rodents. That's the stated rationale. The unstated result is a 2,300 percent spike in a disease that belongs in a history textbook, not an emergency room intake form. You can have a conversation about protecting raptors. You can't have that conversation while your residents are contracting diseases that predate indoor plumbing.
This is what happens when environmental policy gets written by woke politicians who never have to live with the consequences. Gavin Newsom doesn't walk through Skid Row. Karen Bass doesn't eat at the restaurants where rats root through dumpsters after closing. The people who signed A.B. 1788 and A.B. 2552 into law live in neighborhoods where pest control is handled by private contractors who use whatever works.