LOS ANGELES - Imagine a time when peasants lived in appalling, cramped and dirty conditions without sanitation. And were hit hard by malnutrition, declining health and disease spread through animals, rats and fleas. It’s positively medieval and hard to imagine.

Actually, it’s not because, shamefully, you could get in your car and drive right now to Skid Row to see that it’s happening at this precise moment on our streets in downtown Los Angeles. 

Nearly 59,000 humans are living on the streets in L.A. County. Enough to completely fill Dodgers Stadium with 3,000 more lining up outside. That’s a 12 percent increase since last year, so everyday there are more people without homes on the street. About 9,000 were homeless for the first time this year, and the conditions they are having to suffer, especially downtown, are simply dreadful and ripe for disease. Typhus in particular. 

These conditions are already affecting police and health workers, putting them squarely in contact with this dangerous disease. And it’s not alarmist to say that this is how bigger outbreaks can happen, by letting them happen. After all, Typhus is not a common illness, usually something you might pick up abroad in a third world country, not in one of the richest states in the U.S.

It’s because of these honestly disgusting conditions, the dumping of human waste, that attracts vermin, rats, cats, opossums -- the wild animals that we as humans built houses to avoid getting disease from in the first place. It’s spread through infected lice and fleas that live on animals transported by them, not transmitted from human to human.

Which gives us a clue as to how we should fix this and fix it fast. If not, then a medieval disease could definitely take the shine out of tinsel town and affect tourism and business as well. 

We live in a yo-yo economy -- you’re on your own -- where many of us are just one pay check away from the street. Homelessness could easily happen to you or I.

There’s a clear connection -- that if we approach each of our lives as a race to riches and ignore the consequences of others who aren’t so lucky -- fuelled by dreams of fame and fortune in a town thats responsible for that dream -- the result won’t be a fantasy musical or science fiction plot but an actual, stupid human-made tragedy that even the ancient Greek would be impressed by.  

When the plague hit the world in medieval times cures ranged from rubbing a chicken on your body to using leaches and smearing yourself with rotten treacle. But we now live in a world with science and intelligence and medicine. We need to apply that intelligence now. 

Nero is often seen as the historical figure who played fiddle and ignored his people while Rome burned. The truth is that this was actually fake news, he helped his citizens, often with his bare hands, opening the doors of his palace to allow them to shelter.

So perhaps it’s time for our city leaders to wake up, and, in a town where there are so many brilliantly creative minds, start to build the kind of society where being homeless and allowing it to happen is a failure of government and society at the highest level.