Armies of rats running through the streets of downtown Los Angeles are the suspected cause of a Typhus outbreak hitting the city.
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For months rat-infested trash has been piling up on Ceres Avenue, a street that connects downtown LA's bustling produce and garment districts. Now, health officials say accumulations of trash like this could be a cause of an outbreak of the bacterial disease typhus.
LA's mayor is now in apology mode.
"It's disgusting and it's unacceptable," LA Mayor Eric Garcetti told NBC4, after the I-Team showed him pictures of garbage piling up for months.
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When asked why the city hasn't collected trash on a city street, Garcetti responded:
"Well, it should have been. And we're going to get to the bottom of why it wasn't and make sure that it is."
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The LA County Public Health Department says "typhus is a disease that infected fleas can spread to humans." The fleas often live on rodents, cats, and dogs that are drawn to garbage.
There are 57 cases of typhus reported in LA County so far this year, far higher than most years. A cluster of nine cases has been identified in what officials now call "The Typhus Zone," a section of downtown LA encompassing Skid Row and newer upscale residential housing and businesses.
"I actually kind of wanted to die, because I couldn't figure out what I had," said Van Shemirani, who owns a clothing company in the Fashion District. He told NBC4 he suffered two months of high fever and nausea before his doctors at UCLA Medical Center diagnosed him with typhus.
Tomsky: The TV remote and in-room telephone. Lots of germs, bacteria end up on these and they don’t always disinfect them. Also, the decorative pillows. The pillows are rarely cleaned and constantly tossed from the bed to the floor and back to the bed. If it looks like it would be hard to clean in your own house it’s hard to clean in hotel room.
Tomsky: Everything happens in hotel rooms. People die, sometimes on purpose. Remnants of a sexual fetishes or kinks. Basically, a lot of blood, feces, and sexual fluids. All of them, and sometimes all of them at once.
Tomsky: Start with first impressions. The cleanliness of the lobby and public areas are great indicators. If a hotel doesn't seem to care that the lobby looks used, tired, and dirty, they probably feel the same way about the hotel rooms above it.
Tomsky: If it's plastic and it's wrapped, it's safe. If it's glass, consider this: Unfortunately housekeepers have to clean the glasses in the hotel rooms themselves. And they use what they have been given to do this: sometimes it's nothing. Sometimes it's shampoo. Hot water. Sometimes even furniture polish can give it a nice, um, clean look. Don't drink out of glassware.
Tomsky: Failures in this category can come from several sources. Perhaps the particular housekeeper is having a bad day and felt compelled to cut corners in order to leave work as fast as possible. Perhaps the hotel is so understaffed in general they don't even have the work force needed to either wash or change the sheets and towels.
Tomsky: The management! Are they providing the housekeeping department with the necessary tools to even do their job well? Are they training new hires properly? Are they hiring employees who actually care about doing a decent job? Are they running constant, random inspections to make sure everyone currently on staff is maintaining standards of cleanliness?
Tomsky: Take the throw pillows off the bed immediately. If you think the remote is unclean (which it probably is) put a shower cap over it. Hotels also love to take the toilet paper and tissues and give it that origami-style triangle tip. Throw that part in the trash immediately because it's obviously been manipulated by someone else's hand so why on earth would you then use that directly on your body?
Tomsky: Rooms can look clean even when they are not. So look for other details that might indicate it's not as clean as it appears. Is there dust on top of the picture frames? Take a quick peek under the bed, in the drawers, in the corners of the bathroom. If these details seem dirty and appear to have been overlooked then that's a good indication larger, much more important details may also have been overlooked.
Tomsky: Call down and ask for another one! This happens all the time and you won't upset the staff by asking for another room. You don't even have to be specific or do it in person. Call down and say, "You know what, I just checked in but is it okay if I move to another room? I just don't feel comfortable in this one." If they press you (which they shouldn't do if it's a decent property) just say it doesn't feel as fresh as you'd like it too. Or, say you think someone might have smoked a cigarette in the room. Guests smoke all the time without telling us, so that's an easy excuse, and the hotel should move you to another room immediately.
Tomsky: Gave them another room. And another. And if they didn't like that room I'd give them another. I think my record was ten rooms before I finally got this one particular, very selective, guest settled. Any real hotel, any hotel that wants to stay in business, takes cleanliness extremely seriously. It's always worth finding a way to apologize and correct any failure on a hotel's part, cleanliness or otherwise, rather than have an upset guest tell 10,000 of his or her friends to never step foot back inside that particular property or hotel chain.
Shemirani says his warehouse was constantly overrun by rats, which he suspects were the cause of his typhus infection.
"I definitely think I got it from the rats," Shemirani said.
People who work in the downtown and Skid Row areas say they've complained constantly to the city's 311 number to pick up piles of trash but the calls often go unaswered.
Records obtained by the I-Team show the Department of Sanitation received more than 2,200 calls to 311 over a two-year period to pick up trash near homeless encampments but failed to respond to more than half of those calls.
"If someone is calling 311 and not getting through that's unacceptable," Mayor Garcetti told NBC4. "Things sometime slip through the cracks but this is unacceptable and I'm going to make sure that it doesn't happen, Garcetti added.
After Garcetti spoke to NBC4 about the typhus outbreak and the city's failure to control trash and rats, the Mayor's Office called the I-Team. His spokesman Alex Comisar said the city is now allocating an extra $300,000 to cleaning up trash and sanitizing streets around the "Typhus Zone." The clean-up, according to Comisar, has already begun.
There is a typhus epidemic in LA County right now with a recent outbreak of cases around downtown LA.
Here are five things to know:
1. Typhus is not typhoid. Typhus is a disease spread to humans by fleas from dogs, cats and rats. Typhoid is a food-borne illness transmitted through contaminated food and water.
2. A typhus outbreak in LA includes people living on the streets and also workers and business people.
3. Typhus symptoms include high fever, rash, abdominal and muscle pain.
4. Typhus is rarely fatal and can be treated with antibiotics.
5. You can prevent getting typhus by using flea products on your pets and keeping away from wild animals like feral cats and rodents.
