There is also a very large rat population this year...because of the rains.
There have been at least a dozen plague alerts in Los Angeles in the past twenty years. Officials response? "It's the squirrels, man."
Before anyone worried about terrorism or illegal aliens, we had squirrels.
The rats carry the fleas who carry the bacteria...and fleas gravitate to any warm-blooded creature of opportunity. One set of foster parents I had owned the house next door and rented it to anyone willing to pay the rent. One family collected dogs without seeing to their hygiene. When the family moved out the fleas were so thick that I had to hop around in a Hefty sack while trying to repair the damage they left, unnerved by the constant sound of the fleas bouncing off the bag. Those sumbitches survived over two months without easy sources of blood ("dad" refused to pay for a bug bomb).
Is Burbank still the rat capital of the United States? I've read creepy articles about huge swarms of them in odd locations there and the continuing failure to reduce their numbers despite a wide range of tactics.