In recent years, the US has been experiencing a quiet hepatitis A epidemic that hasn't been getting much press coverage. My best understanding is that it began in San Diego County, California and spread outward from there.
Without trying to intentionally track this, I have been aware of its spread across the West Coast states because of events in my own life. Those events are deeply intertwined with why this blog exists, so here is that backstory.
For most of the time that I was on the street, I was homeless in California and a large part of that was spent in San Diego County. I spent about six months in the downtown area and then floated about other parts of San Diego County for another two to three years, I think, before going up to Fresno.
In Fresno, I finally paid off my student loan and when I called my bank to ask for a bump in my credit line based on that detail in hopes of eating for the rest of the month, they bumped my credit line more substantially than I expected. So I used that as an opportunity to book train tickets to Washington state, thereby relocating to someplace cheaper than California, and I got myself back into housing in short order.
While I was on the train and had poor to no internet access, I recieved an email from a reporter in the San Diego area because of my blog the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. I finally saw this email when I got to a hotel in Washington.
I exchanged emails with this person in the last days that I was still homeless while trying to get myself back into housing. The publication date for the piece is September 8, 2017.
They misquoted me and misgendered me. On September 21, 2017, I wrote a correction.
A few months later, I was contacted by another reporter in California. I don't think I have any records of this. I might have an email somewhere, but my recollection is they were in the Los Angeles area and had also contacted me because of my blog the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide.
We did a phone interview. I don't think I blogged about it and if they cited me as a source somewhere in some article, I am unaware of where that might be. But I now knew that the Hepatitis A epidemic had reached the Los Angeles area.
In September 2019 I got an email titled Hepatitis A Outbreak Alert for Homelessness Service Providers indicating that it had now reached Washington state. My county -- Grays Harbor County -- was not listed as one of the affected counties at that time.
This email caught my attention in part because the city I live in, Aberdeen, had an extremely bad homeless problem at the time. On a per capita basis, it was worse than larger cities that routinely make the news for their homeless problems.
I happened to have written about that shortly before getting the aforementioned email in a piece on this site called A Small Town With Big City Problems -- Only Cubed.
I didn't think too much about this during the Covid-19 pandemic. There were widespread lock downs and the local homeless problem seemed to temporarily mostly disappear.
I tend to assume that the spread of Hepatitis A was probably curtailed during the lock downs that were intended to curtail the spread of Covid-19 but I don't actually have data on that.
As people are getting vaccinated and the world is starting to try to get back to normal, I am seeing more homeless people on the street again and I am concerned that the Covid-19 pandemic will be followed very closely by a local Hepatitis A outbreak.
I initially wrote a post about this for a local blog of mine, but decided to take that information and rework it to post it here and try to get more attention on the topic generally. Although it got my attention because of this confluence of events fairly directly impacting my life, so I am concerned about this potentially becoming a really big problem for my small town, it's not actually a strictly local issue.
This is actually a problem for multiple US states and it isn't getting much press. My impression is that this means communities are tending to learn about it after it hits them, not before, which means it is being handled in a reactionary fashion, not a pro-active planning fashion.
I am perhaps best known for my writing on the topic of homelessness and this epidemic hits the homeless population pretty hard and that population may be a large part of why this is spreading the way it is, which is why I chose to put it on this blog in specific (one of many that I run).
This old news clip generally agrees with the facts as I understand them: That this Hepatitis A epidemica began in San Diego, where people were dying, and has spread to Washington state. It was in and around Seattle at the time this clip was made. I don't have more recent info about how far it has spread.
For more information, please see the CDC section on Hepatitis. You can find info on things like symptoms and descriptions of at-risk populations.
Without trying to intentionally track this, I have been aware of its spread across the West Coast states because of events in my own life. Those events are deeply intertwined with why this blog exists, so here is that backstory.
For most of the time that I was on the street, I was homeless in California and a large part of that was spent in San Diego County. I spent about six months in the downtown area and then floated about other parts of San Diego County for another two to three years, I think, before going up to Fresno.
In Fresno, I finally paid off my student loan and when I called my bank to ask for a bump in my credit line based on that detail in hopes of eating for the rest of the month, they bumped my credit line more substantially than I expected. So I used that as an opportunity to book train tickets to Washington state, thereby relocating to someplace cheaper than California, and I got myself back into housing in short order.
While I was on the train and had poor to no internet access, I recieved an email from a reporter in the San Diego area because of my blog the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. I finally saw this email when I got to a hotel in Washington.
I exchanged emails with this person in the last days that I was still homeless while trying to get myself back into housing. The publication date for the piece is September 8, 2017.
They misquoted me and misgendered me. On September 21, 2017, I wrote a correction.
A few months later, I was contacted by another reporter in California. I don't think I have any records of this. I might have an email somewhere, but my recollection is they were in the Los Angeles area and had also contacted me because of my blog the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide.
We did a phone interview. I don't think I blogged about it and if they cited me as a source somewhere in some article, I am unaware of where that might be. But I now knew that the Hepatitis A epidemic had reached the Los Angeles area.
In September 2019 I got an email titled Hepatitis A Outbreak Alert for Homelessness Service Providers indicating that it had now reached Washington state. My county -- Grays Harbor County -- was not listed as one of the affected counties at that time.
This email caught my attention in part because the city I live in, Aberdeen, had an extremely bad homeless problem at the time. On a per capita basis, it was worse than larger cities that routinely make the news for their homeless problems.
I happened to have written about that shortly before getting the aforementioned email in a piece on this site called A Small Town With Big City Problems -- Only Cubed.
I didn't think too much about this during the Covid-19 pandemic. There were widespread lock downs and the local homeless problem seemed to temporarily mostly disappear.
I tend to assume that the spread of Hepatitis A was probably curtailed during the lock downs that were intended to curtail the spread of Covid-19 but I don't actually have data on that.
As people are getting vaccinated and the world is starting to try to get back to normal, I am seeing more homeless people on the street again and I am concerned that the Covid-19 pandemic will be followed very closely by a local Hepatitis A outbreak.
I initially wrote a post about this for a local blog of mine, but decided to take that information and rework it to post it here and try to get more attention on the topic generally. Although it got my attention because of this confluence of events fairly directly impacting my life, so I am concerned about this potentially becoming a really big problem for my small town, it's not actually a strictly local issue.
This is actually a problem for multiple US states and it isn't getting much press. My impression is that this means communities are tending to learn about it after it hits them, not before, which means it is being handled in a reactionary fashion, not a pro-active planning fashion.
I am perhaps best known for my writing on the topic of homelessness and this epidemic hits the homeless population pretty hard and that population may be a large part of why this is spreading the way it is, which is why I chose to put it on this blog in specific (one of many that I run).
This old news clip generally agrees with the facts as I understand them: That this Hepatitis A epidemica began in San Diego, where people were dying, and has spread to Washington state. It was in and around Seattle at the time this clip was made. I don't have more recent info about how far it has spread.
For more information, please see the CDC section on Hepatitis. You can find info on things like symptoms and descriptions of at-risk populations.