There's a typhus epidemic in Los Angeles just like any other third world city

It's true. The same disease that afflicts many residents of Caracas, Venezuela is spreading in Los Angeles and city officials - not to mention residents - are frightened.

Typhus is spread by fleas hitching a ride on rats. The rat population in LA is doing fine, thank you, as piles of garbage dot the cityscape, making it Thanksgiving Day every day for the city's fat, happy rodents.

NBC4:

For months, LA County public health officials have said typhus is mainly hitting the homeless population.

But Deputy City Attorney Liz Greenwood, a veteran prosecutor, tells NBC4 she was diagnosed with typhus in November, after experiencing high fevers and excruciating headaches.

"It felt like somebody was driving railroad stakes through my eyes and out the back of my neck," Greenwood told the I-Team. "Who gets typhus? It's a medieval disease that's caused by trash."

Characterizing typhus as a "medieval" disease is terribly unfair - to medieval people. It's a disease of the third world where city services have broken down and trash pickup becomes a luxury.

The city attorney who contracted the disease works at city hall - a building apparently infested with rats.

Greenwood believes she contracted typhus from fleas in her office at City Hall East. Fleas often live on rats, which congregate in the many heaps of trash that are visible across the city of LA, and are a breeding ground for typhus.

"There are rats in City Hall and City Hall East," Greenwood added. "There are enormous rats and their tails are as long as their bodies."

Characterizing typhus as a “medieval” disease is terribly unfair - to medieval people. It’s a disease of the third world

She can’t call it a third-world disease—that would be judgmental and perhaps cause people to think that L.A. might be better off with fewer folks from the third world. By calling it “medieval” she avoids all of that and can make a bit of a slam on European culture at the same time.

This is what I completely don’t understand: we have falling apart roads & bridges, vets who are homeless, elderly people on Medicare (my mom) who get LESS services than leeches on Medicaid & YET....some of the powers that be want to bring in people who will further stretch our already used up tax dollars. Our people, our country should comes first.

And I say this as someone who would never expect my broke self to be paid for in any other country. It should be for their people only. Only exception would be if I was the victim of a crime or accident in the host country.

Quite possible.

By being so liberal about homeless, druggies, trash, human waste etc, they have allowed the situation to deteriorate to where we are today.

Did we have typhus outbreaks in 1960 or 1970? If not, what was different about those times? What did we do differently then to prevent such public health emergencies?

I’ve been warned by liberal types, not to be nostalgic for the old days, because gays were in the closet, blacks were under Jim Crow down south, women were in the kitchen, etc.

But I would love to know if homeless encampments were allowed back then, if drug addicts were permitted to freely roam and leave their waste, etc.. There may well be lessons to learn from how previous generations would have dealt with such problems.

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