In late November 2010, LA Times columnist Meghan Daum used her column to disclose a near-fatal medical episode: what she’d thought was an ordinary flu virus had turned out to be murine typhus, transmitted via flea feces from backyard rodents. The two-part essay — published over a week, with Daum responding to reader mail between installments — read at the time like a personal-health column. In retrospect it was an early warning about an LA public-health problem that became significant later in the decade.
Then
Daum’s two LA Times columns laid out the diagnostic confusion. She had presented with flu-like symptoms; doctors didn’t initially suspect typhus because the disease isn’t usually on the LA medical radar; the diagnosis took weeks; she had been near death by the time the antibiotics started working. Murine typhus is endemic in some Southern California areas — transmitted via fleas that have fed on infected rats, possums, and other backyard wildlife — but the case load in 2010 was small enough that most LA-area physicians weren’t pattern-matching to it.
The columns drew unusual reader engagement. Daum responded in Part 2 to the mail Part 1 had generated — questions about flea control, about how the diagnosis was eventually made, about whether the case was an isolated outlier. The original FishbowlLA framing acknowledged the column’s gravity while admiring its tone: Daum had written about a near-death health crisis without either melodrama or false bravery.
The broader LA public-health context was, as Daum noted, that the city’s flea-rodent vector infrastructure was capable of producing this kind of case at low but persistent rates.
Now
The murine typhus question Daum’s columns surfaced grew significantly across the decade that followed. LA County recorded a substantial rise in flea-borne typhus cases starting around 2018 — including high-profile cases among public officials and city workers, and outbreaks tied to homelessness encampments with elevated rat populations. The disease has remained a recurring LA public-health story across multiple years, with the LA Times itself covering it repeatedly — including pieces explicitly citing Daum’s 2010 columns as an early warning.
Meghan Daum continued at the LA Times for years after the typhus episode. Her LAT column ran through the mid-2010s before she transitioned out of regular weekly column work. She has since built a sustained writing career across books and podcasts — including the 2018 book The Problem with Everything, the 2014 essay collection The Unspeakable, and her long-running The Unspeakable podcast, which has been one of the more idiosyncratic culture-and-politics podcast properties of the late 2010s and 2020s. She has continued to write essays and columns across multiple publications.
The 2010 typhus episode itself appears, in retrospect, as one of the small documented moments when a daily-paper columnist’s personal-health column became part of a larger public-health record. The LA public-health response to flea-borne typhus through the 2020s has improved, but the underlying infrastructure problem — urban wildlife serving as flea hosts — remains the city’s ongoing challenge.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: December 2010 snapshot