The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has more than 5,000 employees and an annual budget of $1.3 billion, and if it wasn’t a completely useless agency, it might be worth the money.
Maybe you remember the department’s maniacal enforcement of useless COVID restrictions (no beach chairs!) contrasted against its recommendations to limit the spread of monkeypox (“Avoid riskier activities such as anonymous sex and sex parties.”)
Today we have a new entry in the annals of useless public health: “a record number of flea-borne typhus cases in Los Angeles County.”
The Department of Public Health sent out a press release on April 2 to inform the public that “alarmingly, nearly 9 out of 10 people identified as infected with typhus required hospitalization.” That certainly is alarming. What do you suppose the department recommends to reduce the spread of this dangerous disease?
“Public Health urges people to take these key steps now,” the news release continued, advising L.A. County residents to use flea control on their pets, avoid stray animals, and “secure trash” in containers with “tightly fitting lids.” Also, “close off crawl spaces and seal openings where animals can enter, hide or find food.”
Can we talk?
Flea-borne typhus is spread on rats.
Los Angeles has a rat problem.
The responsibility for dealing with the rat problem resides in the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
Now let’s talk about how L.A. developed a rat problem. “Rodents will eat human feces, they will eat scraps,” one expert told NBC4’s investigative team in a 2019 report. The station documented the surging population of disease-carrying rats amid “heaps of uncollected garbage” and “various homeless encampments, including one on Venice Boulevard where people defecate on the streets.”
But the L.A. County Department of Public Health didn’t advise local elected officials to enforce an anti-camping ordinance, as the U.S. Supreme Court decisively ruled in 2024 that they could.
Nor did the department’s highly-paid director, Barbara Ferrer, rush to the microphones to tell state and local lawmakers that their various laws aimed at reducing landfill seem to have coincided with a dangerous increase in illegal dumping.
And nobody from the department asked the legislature to reconsider recent laws that gradually banned the strongest rat poisons. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three of them: Assembly Bill 1788 went into effect on January 1, 2021; AB 1322 went into effect on January 1, 2024; AB 2552 went into effect January 1, 2025.
These laws were enacted despite warnings, quoted in the bill analysis prepared for the legislature, that the blanket ban on anticoagulant rodenticides, used by licensed commercial pest control professionals in specific situations, would “threaten public health.”
The Public Health Department had nothing to say about that.
And Barbara Ferrer said not a word about laws that have increased the cost of trash collection and the legal compliance burden to meet state mandates related to trash.
For example, AB 341, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2011, set a statewide “goal” of 75% waste diversion from landfills and mandated recycling by commercial and multi-family residential accounts. Brown signed AB 1826 in 2014 to further increase recycling requirements and Senate Bill 1383 in 2016, which mandated a 75% reduction in “organic waste” by 2025.
Cities have responded with limits on trash volume and higher fees for trash collection. The result?
“In recent years, several urban areas have experienced an increase in illegal dumping activity,” reports the bill analysis for SB 1230, new legislation proposing increased penalties for illegal dumping. “In Oakland, the amount of illegally dumped trash collected by the city has increased sixfold since 2015. Los Angeles County’s illegal dumping cleanup costs grew from $2.3 million in [fiscal year] 2019-2020 to $6.8 million in FY 2023-2024, a nearly threefold increase.”
Did the L.A. County Public Health Department recommend removing limits on trash collection, restoring the use of quickly effective rat poisons when needed for public health, or issuing an emergency declaration to enable the rapid clearing of homeless encampments?
No. Ferrer’s department said, “The good news is that flea-borne typhus is treatable with antibiotics, especially when diagnosed early.”
I suppose we should be grateful that she’s not mandating masks and closing the beaches.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley