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In a typical year, San Diego County might see a few dozen cases of hepatitis A.
So far this year? More than 400, with 15 people now killed by the liver disease.
“This is an outbreak like none other that we’ve ever had,” said Dr. Wilma Wooten, the region’s public health officer.
Dr. Wooten said the response has been complicated by the infection’s nebulous spread. Whereas past outbreaks have commonly been traced to a single food source, allowing the threat to be swiftly contained, this one is passing person to person.
San Diego’s homeless population has been hit hardest by the virus, which stalks its victims more readily in areas of poor sanitation.
Another outbreak has unfolded among the homeless population in Santa Cruz County, where public health officials have confirmed 67 cases since April. Across the country, there have been reported spikes in Michigan and Colorado.
Continue reading the main storyBut none on the scale of San Diego.
Highly contagious, hepatitis A causes symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and jaundice. It’s treatable, but can knock a victim out for weeks.
San Diego health workers have been trying to slow its spread since March, when an uptick in cases was detected. More than 19,000 people have gotten the first of two immunization shots, administered six months apart.
Still, cases have continued to emerge, said Dr. Wooten. County officials were sufficiently alarmed this month to declare a health emergency.
Critics have accused the city and county of a lack of urgency in addressing the crisis.
Besides vaccination, temporary hand-washing stations help provide a defense against the virus’s spread.
Yet by last week, only two had been set up on city streets, according to a report in the The Voice of San Diego. (Dozens more have since been added, Dr. Wooten said.)
“In hindsight you can always say, ‘Could we do more?’” said Greg Cox, a San Diego County supervisor. “I’m not happy that it took so long to get the hand-washing stations out there. But the real key — the best prevention — is going to be the vaccinations.”
Mr. Cox said the crisis represented a wake up call on the plight of San Diego’s homeless.
“Clearly there’s a relationship,” he said. “And we really need to get to the root cause of this hep A crisis in San Diego, which is really related to the homeless crisis.”
California Online
(Please note: We regularly highlight articles on sites that have limited access for nonsubscribers.)
• Los Angeles leaders are planning a push to declare the city a “sanctuary” for immigrants. [Los Angeles Times]
• “The Republican Party in California continues its long, slow slide.” [The Eonomist]
• A French artist has installed an image of a child overlooking the United States from the Mexico border. [The New York Times]
• The man who shoved a pie in the Sacramento mayor’s face (and was pummeled in return) will avoid jail time. He claims it was an act of “political theater.” [Sacramento Bee]
• “Leslie Van Houten committed an act of terrorism. She should stay behind bars.” [Opinion | Los Angeles Times]
• Colin Kaepernick is now (and may forever be) known for a simple, silent gesture. [The New York Times]
• A judge ruled that Jahi McMath, an Oakland teenager who was declared brain-dead in 2013, may technically still be alive. [The Associated Press]
• San Diego, San Jose, Sacramento — everyone seems to be vying to host Amazon’s planned second headquarters. [San Diego Union-Tribune, The Mercury News, Sacramento Bee]
• Hollywood had a horrible summer and it’s blaming Rotten Tomatoes. [The New York Times]
• The film adaptation of Stephen King’s “It” is a “skillful blend of nostalgic sentiment and hair-raising effects,” A.O. Scott writes. [The New York Times]
• The population of monarch butterflies that crowd California trees every winter has plummeted. Scientists say they could go extinct if nothing is done. [San Francisco Chronicle]
• What you get for $1.7 million in West Tisbury, Mass.; Boothbay, Me.; and Calabasas, Calif. [The New York Times]
And Finally ...
Clara Foltz was not easily deterred.
A divorced mother of five living in 19th-century San Jose, she resolved to practice law.
But at the time, only white men were allowed to do so.
So she drafted the “Woman Lawyer’s Bill” and convinced a state lawmaker to introduce it. The measure prevailed over the warnings of opponents that a woman’s “seductive” ways would sway juries.
Later, Ms. Foltz was said to have charged uninvited into Gov. William Irwin’s office and pleaded with him to sign the bill. He did.
It was this week in 1878 that Ms. Foltz passed the bar exam, making her California’s first female lawyer.
She became a successful trial lawyer and a towering figure in the women’s movement, said Barbara Babcock, a professor emeritus of law at Stanford who wrote a biography of Ms. Foltz.
“Sometimes she would be the only woman in the courtroom and talking to this all-male jury. It’s a wonderful scene I think,” she said.
Every move Ms. Foltz made, it seemed, resulted in another milestone.
She sued Hastings College of Law in San Francisco to compel it to allow women, and won.
She pioneered the idea of the public defender.
She became the first woman to serve as clerk of the state Assembly’s judiciary committee, the first woman deputy district attorney in the United States and the first woman appointed to the state board of corrections.
After practicing law for five decades, Ms. Foltz died in 1934 at the age of 85.
In 2002, Los Angeles’s Criminal Courts Building was renamed in her honor. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was there for the ceremony.
“She was really the pioneer for women lawyers,” Justice O’Connor said, according to The Los Angeles Times. “When she saw a wrong, she worked to correct it.”
California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.
The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Los Osos.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.
Continue reading the main story