The Vermin Are Winning in Los Angeles: Five Dead From West Nile, Typhus Makes an Encore

Los Angeles County is now reporting 100 West Nile virus cases this year, nearly five times the total recorded for all of 2025, with 94 hospitalizations and five deaths. The numbers come from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and were highlighted Thursday by FOX 11’s Matthew Seedorff. 

NEW: West Nile virus cases are surging in Los Angeles County.

100 cases have been reported this year — nearly 5 TIMES the total number of cases reported during all of 2025.

94 people have been hospitalized and 5 have died. pic.twitter.com/jPdOMnm8DQ

— Matthew Seedorff (@MattSeedorff) September 24, 2026

Officials are spraying in neighborhoods like La Puente while urging residents to screen their windows, dump standing water, and slather on repellent. 

Los Angeles County Department of Public Health “protects health, prevents disease, and promotes health and well-being for all persons in Los Angeles County”—a mission that would be easier to take seriously if the county were not simultaneously posting record typhus counts, five West Nile deaths, and another reminder that fleas, rats, and mosquitoes are doing the governing.

This is no isolated outbreak. It is the latest chapter in a years-long public health collapse that California Globe has documented since the late 2010s: third-world and medieval diseases returning to one of the wealthiest counties in America because basic sanitation, rodent control, and street-level order were abandoned.

Yesterday, Globe Editor-in-Chief Katy Grimes reported on the newest flea-borne typhus cluster in Wilshire Center: seven cases, six hospitalized. Countywide, officials have logged 109 typhus cases so far in 2026 after a record 220 last year. Nearly nine in ten of those 2025 patients required hospitalization. 

These outbreaks can be directly traced to the 2020 legislative ban on effective rodenticides (AB 1788) that passed even as rats overran homeless encampments and City Hall itself. Defying basic health protocols, San Francisco adopted a catch-and-release rat policy. The results have been deadly.

In 2019, we quoted Dr. Drew Pinsky describing Los Angeles conditions as “not third-world, this is Medieval. Third-world countries are insulted if they are accused of being like this.” 

Pinsky pointed to exploding tuberculosis, typhus, the looming threat of plague on rat fleas, and typhoid from fecal contamination. He noted Los Angeles was one of the only major U.S. cities without a rodent-control program. 

Those warnings were published as Hepatitis A ripped through San Diego, typhus hit downtown L.A. and City Hall employees, and LAPD officers at Central Station contracted typhoid fever amid rat infestations so severe officers considered transferring. The California Environmental Protection Agency headquarters building in downtown Sacramento fought a rat infestation for more than five weeks.

The threat remains, made worse by homeless encampments and policy failures.

Standing water, trash, human waste, and feral animals create perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes, fleas, and rats. West Nile is mosquito-borne; typhus is flea-borne from rats, opossums, and stray cats. Both thrive where encampments flourish, streets go uncleaned, and political leadership treats pest control not as a public health duty, but as an afterthought or an environmental sin. 

County data show this year’s West Nile cases concentrated in East Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, and the South Bay— the same landscape of endless tents and poor sanitation that has driven typhus records year after year.

County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis, the official now warning residents to use repellent and dump standing water, is a UCLA-trained family physician with an MPH from Harvard. He is not an infectious-disease specialist. The county sold his 2018 appointment as something else: a “noted national advocate” for putting a health-equity framework inside government agencies. Director Barbara Ferrer said she wanted him to help “promote health equity and justice.” His own listed specialties include health equity.

That is the résumé the county chose to lead medical guidance while typhus set records and West Nile killed five people. Equity language does not drain standing water, run a rodent-control program, or keep fleas off the street. Davis’s public comments on these outbreaks have been the same generic checklist issued after every cluster. Missing is any hard accounting of why the vermin are winning.

Notice where “Accountability” sits on the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s own list: fourth. Equity, Inclusivity, and Collaboration come first. Healthy communities and “optimal health and well-being for all” are the vision and mission. Then come five more values before anyone gets around to being a responsible steward of public funds. Rats, fleas, and mosquitoes did not wait for item four.

West Nile’s fivefold jump is not a surprise. It is the predictable result of refusing to restore order on the streets.

Mosquitoes do not care about equity, inclusivity, or collaboration. Neither do fleas. Until Los Angeles treats sanitation and pest control as non-negotiable public-health infrastructure instead of optional amenities, the outbreaks will keep coming.