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Stay Well
breaking health news & updates
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Flu Shots Are Here. When's The Ideal Time To Get One, And Should You Get It With The COVID Vaccine? | |
Flu shot season is upon us.
Pharmacies began giving out the vaccines — which are recommended for everyone ages 6 months and older — last month. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends getting a flu shot either this month or next, since flu activity typically picks up in the fall, with cases reaching their peak sometime from December to February.
It takes around two weeks for the vaccine to become fully effective.
“You really want to think about getting your appointment or making your plan to get vaccinated sometime around the last half of September through the end of October,” said Dr. Judith O’Donnell, chief of infectious diseases at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia.
This year’s flu shots are trivalent, meaning they protect against three flu viruses: two versions of influenza A and one type of influenza B. For more than a decade, flu shots in the U.S. also protected against a fourth strain of influenza B, but that strain hasn’t circulated since March 2020, so the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee elected this year to exclude it.
Last year, around 25,000 people died of the flu in the U.S. and 400,000 were hospitalized. NBC News Read more
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Mass shootings have effects on communities that are felt long after the day's tragedy. School shootings in particular can have physical, emotional and behavioral effects on kids — even if the shooting occurred on the other side of the country.
Exposure to school shootings, even if indirectly, is shown to disrupt people’s sense of safety and stability, said Sonali Rajan, professor at Columbia University, who studies firearm-related harms on children.
Talking about it can help.
Parents aren't alone in this task. Many health experts, including psychologists and grief counselors, remind people there are resources to support students’ mental and emotional health as they grieve and process.
How much children are able to understand a situation will depend on their age and development, Ney said. Daily Kos Read more
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“Even if you didn’t know anyone involved, even if they were very far away from you, it is okay to grieve. It shows that you care about others.”
Emilie Ney, Director of Professional Development at the National Association of School Psychologists
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Fruit Fly Discovery Puts Part Of Alameda County Into Quarantine
The spotting of a single mated female Mediterranean fruit fly has sent 71 square miles of southern Alameda County into a quarantine as officials focus on eradicating the invasive pest, the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Plant Health and Pest Prevention Services Division announced Friday. Residents and any growers, wholesalers and retailers of susceptible fruit are subject to the quarantine. The targeted area has boundaries of Highway 84 on the north, the Alameda and Santa Clara county line on the south, the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge on the west and Calaveras Creek on the east. During the quarantine, the first in Alameda County since 1981, home gardeners are encouraged to consume their own produce on site and to not move produce from their properties. Those living in the area can consume, juice, cook, grind in the garbage disposal or otherwise process produce on the property where it was picked. When disposing of produce, it’s recommended to double-bag waste and place it in the regular trash bin instead of the green waste bin, officials said.
Mercury News Read more
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Kaiser Permanente To Close Skilled Nursing Facility In San Leandro, Cutting 249 Jobs
Kaiser Permanente has announced the closure of its last free-standing company-owned skilled nursing facility — also known as a nursing home — in California, leading to 249 job losses. Regulatory filings reveal that the Kaiser Permanente Post Acute Care Center at 1440 168th Ave. in San Leandro will be permanently closed by mid-November, affecting a range of employees including administrators, physical therapists, dietitians, licensed vocational nurses and, primarily, certified nursing assistants. The San Leandro facility was previously ranked among California’s top nursing homes by U.S. News & World Report in 2018-19. Kaiser Permanente said Tuesday that it began the process of closing the facility in June and that the last patients left by the end of July. The company said there would be no loss of services to its members and patients.
SF Chronicle Read more
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Bay Area Surgeon Says AI Is Advancing Rapidly Into Hospitals And Operating Rooms
Artificial intelligence is already making its way into hospitals, where doctors say it could be a game changer impacting everything from diagnostics to treatment to research. In Dr. Allan Conway's operating room, the day starts with a good old fashioned scrub, a classic ritual for a surgery that's anything but traditional. A leading vascular surgeon at Marin Health Medical Center, Conway is pioneering the use of artificial intelligence to treat aneurysms, known as the silent killer. "It's exciting. It can analyze and help us identify exactly where the aneurysm is, Conway said. According to the Society for Vascular Surgery, every year, roughly 200,000 Americans are diagnosed with abdominal aortic aneurysms, which occur when a segment of the body's largest blood vessel becomes enlarged. Left untreated, it could lead to internal bleeding and death. CBS News Read more
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What To Know About Updated Vaccines, At-Home Tests, And Local Wastewater Data
The summer COVID-19 surge peaked in August, according to Alameda County Public Health officials, but they also caution an unpredictable winter surge is on the horizon and are urging people, especially the immunocompromised, to stay up to date on their vaccines. Dr. Joanna Locke from Alameda County Public Health Division of Communicable Disease Control & Prevention said the summer surge lasted longer than expected. “COVID keeps us guessing, so it’s hard to predict when and how long the winter surge will be,” she said. The Food and Drug Administration has approved three updated COVID vaccines ahead of the expected winter spike in cases: Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, and a third one from Novavax, which received emergency-use authorization from the FDA in August. Locke said that all three updated vaccines will target the KP.2 variant currently circulating, and the Novavax vaccine is a traditional vaccine that contains the spike protein of the virus. Oaklandside Read more
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As Interest From Families Wanes, Pediatricians Scale Back On COVID Shots
When pediatrician Eric Ball opened a refrigerator full of childhood vaccines, all the expected shots were there — DTaP, polio, pneumococcal vaccine — except one. “This is where we usually store our COVID vaccines, but we don’t have any right now because they all expired at the end of last year and we had to dispose of them,” said Ball, who is part of a pediatric practice in Orange County, California. “We thought demand would be way higher than it was.” Pediatricians across the country are pre-ordering the updated and reformulated COVID-19 vaccine for the fall and winter respiratory virus season, but some doctors said they’re struggling to predict whether parents will be interested. Providers like Ball don’t want to waste money ordering doses that won’t be used, but they need enough on hand to vaccinate vulnerable children. Mercury News Read more
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Teen Girls’ Brains Aged Rapidly During Pandemic, Study Finds
A study of adolescent brain development that tested children before and after coronavirus pandemic lockdowns in the United States found that girls’ brains aged far faster than expected, something the researchers attributed to social isolation. The study from the University of Washington, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, measured cortical thinning, a process that starts in either late childhood or early adolescence, as the brain begins to prune redundant synapses and shrink its outer layer. Thinning of the cortex is not necessarily bad; some scientists frame the process as the brain rewiring itself as it matures, increasing its efficiency. But the process is known to accelerate in stressful conditions, and accelerated thinning is correlated with depression and anxiety. NY Times Read more
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State/National/International News | | |
Health Care In California: How The State Made Almost Everyone Eligible For Coverage
Almost everyone in California has health insurance. That trend reflects about a decade and a half of policymaking designed to expand access to health care. The state’s average uninsured rate has dropped from nearly one in four Californians in 2009 to less than one in ten today. At the start of 2024, Democratic lawmakers led California to become one of only two states in the nation to offer state-funded health insurance to all low-income undocumented immigrant Californians. It was a major milestone that allowed the state to start covering its largest remaining uninsured group. Amid the state’s historically low uninsured rates, though, some gaps remain. They include undocumented families who earn too much money to qualify for state-supported insurance. And, health care remains expensive despite efforts to bring down the cost of care. Californians spend more money on health care than the national average. CalMatters Read more
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Health Agencies Scramble To Prepare For New Mpox Strain
State and federal health agencies are gearing up to respond to a new strain of mpox — the virus formerly known as monkeypox — if the new strain spreads to the United States. But this time, they are doing so with fewer resources. Both an mpox public health emergency declaration and federal pandemic preparedness law were still in effect in 2022, the last time the U.S. faced a widespread mpox outbreak. That gave the federal government and state health departments more resources and flexibility than it has now to deal with an outbreak. Last month, the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern, the highest alarm under international health law, over the new mpox strain. The strain, known as clade 1b, has been rapidly circulating in central Africa and has been detected in Sweden and Thailand. Mercury News Read more
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Mammogram Patients Now Have To Be Told About Their Breast Density. Here's What To Know
Mammography facilities now have to notify patients about the density of their breasts, a step aimed at improving early detection of breast cancer. The new rule, which went into effect Tuesday, was part of updated mammography regulations outlined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year. While similar laws have already been enacted in many states, including Colorado and Minnesota, this is the first nationwide regulation. This ruling, which will inform patients whether they have dense breasts or not, is "so important," Dr. Elizabeth Comen, breast cancer oncologist at NYU Langone Health said Tuesday on "CBS Mornings." "This is critical for two reasons. One, having dense breasts may increase your risk of breast cancer. And number two, when you have dense breasts, it means that when you get a mammogram, it may be harder to detect a breast cancer, and you may need additional imaging," she said. CBS News
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As Record Heat Sweeps The U.S., Some People Must Choose Between Food And Energy Bills
During the heat dome that blanketed much of the Southeast in June, Stacey Freeman used window units to cool her poorly insulated mobile home in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Over the winter, the 44-year-old mom relied on space heaters. In both instances, her energy bills reached hundreds of dollars a month. “Sometimes I have to choose whether I’m going to pay the light bill,” Freeman said, “or do I pay all the rent or buy food or not let my son do a sport?” As a regional field organizer for PowerUp NC, Freeman’s job is to help people properly weatherize their homes, particularly in the Sandhills region, where she lives and works and where poverty and rising temperatures make residents vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change. But Freeman’s income is too high to benefit from the very services she helps others attain from that grassroots sustainability, clean energy, and environmental justice initiative. KFF Health News Read more
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Youth Vaping Continues Its Tumble From A Juul-Fueled High
The number of U.S. kids who are using e-cigarettes has continued to tumble, new federal data show, prompting government health officials to declare an incremental victory in their fight against youth tobacco use. Around 6% of middle and high school students used vapes in 2024, down from 8% last year, and a record high of 20% in 2019, according to a survey released Thursday by the FDA and the CDC. The vape brand Juul fueled this surge, but has since receded in popularity after FDA actions and legal challenges. Public health officials previously struggled to attribute that decline to fewer kids vaping, due to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting data collection. This year, though, the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control are celebrating the drop. STAT Read more
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Self-Swab HPV Test Set To Arrive In Doctors' Offices This Month. What You Should Know
One of the first tests that allows
patients to self-collect samples to screen for human papillomavirus (HPV) will soon be available in doctors' offices. In May, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a self-swab test from global medical technology company Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) for "clinical" use, meaning in a private room inside a doctor's office, in a mobile clinic, or in another health care setting. BD told ABC News that it started shipping its self-swab kits, called the BD Onclarity HPV Assay, to doctors' offices on Thursday and that kits will begin arriving at health care facilities later this month. ABC7 Read more
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Parkinson’s May Begin In The Gut, Study Says, Adding To Growing Evidence
A new study adds to a growing body of evidence that Parkinson’s disease, long believed to have its origins in the brain, may begin in the gut. Gastrointestinal problems are common in patients with neurodegenerative disorders, to the point where a condition known as “institutional colon” was once thought to afflict those who lived in mental health institutions.
In Parkinson’s disease, the entire gastrointestinal tract is affected, causing complications such as constipation, drooling, trouble swallowing and delayed emptying of the stomach. These symptoms often appear up to two decades before motor symptoms such
as rigidity or tremor. Washington Post
Read more
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California’s Homeless Population Grew Again This Year
New data shows nearly 186,000 people now live on the streets and in homeless shelters in California, proving the crisis continues to grow despite increasing state and local efforts to stem the tide. That’s according to an exclusive CalMatters analysis of the latest results of the point-in-time count, a federally mandated census that requires counties to tally their unhoused residents over the course of one night or early morning in January. The count is up slightly from last year’s tally of about 181,000, and up 8% from 2022 (the last year most California counties counted people living in encampments). But there’s some good news: The rate at which the homelessness crisis is growing appears to have slowed. It grew 13% between 2019 and 2022, 13% between 2017 and 2019, and 16% between 2015 and 2017. And homelessness actually dropped significantly from 2022 in at least nine counties – bucking what for some was a yearslong trend of increases. At least four other counties saw their populations remain relatively steady. CalMatters Read more
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Can AI Help Solve Homelessness? Gov. Newsom Thinks So
Gov. Gavin Newsom is asking artificial intelligence companies to help solve the state’s most pressing challenges — housing and homelessness. On Thursday, Newsom announced the state will seek proposals from AI developers, such as Bay Area tech giants Google and Open AI, to help officials connect homeless people with shelter or treatment and speed up the local permitting and approval process for affordable housing. “As the birthplace of the tech industry and the fifth largest economy in the world, California isn’t afraid of progress,” Newsom said in a statement. “We’ll deploy every tool to address some of the most vexing issues of our time, including the housing and homelessness crisis.” At last count, California had an estimated 181,000 homeless residents, accounting for nearly one in three unhoused people nationwide. Despite spending $24 billion on homelessness programs since 2019, the state still lacks anywhere near enough shelter and treatment beds for everyone on the street. East Bay Times Read more
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"A Revolving Door": Why Getting Housing Doesn't Always Mean An End To Homelessness
A couple of years ago, Larry Williams was living out of his Nissan Sentra and recovering from gunshot wounds that left him alternating between a wheelchair, crutches and a cane. Williams, now 30, had gotten caught in the crossfire at Oakland’s Juneteenth festival at Lake Merritt in 2021, not long after the pandemic put an end to his job as a security guard. He got a break in the spring of 2022 when an outreach worker signed him up for housing. Resources and support aligned to get him off the streets and into his own East Oakland apartment. He even got some help paying for furniture and other necessities. But there was a catch: That rental assistance came with an expiration date, and time was up. The last of his subsidized rent payments was issued in May. Now he’s on the hook for the full $1,875 per month rent, while his only income is $1,300 a month in disability benefits, and Williams is on the verge of moving back into his car. KQED Read more
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Biden Administration Finalizes Rules To Ensure Insurers Pay For Mental Health Care
The Biden administration on Monday announced it would finalize a highly anticipated proposal meant to force health insurers to cover mental health care on the same basis as physical health conditions. It is the latest salvo in a long-running federal government effort to crack down on insurance plans skimping on treatment for conditions including anxiety, depression, and addiction. Despite a longstanding law requiring health insurers to cover mental health as comprehensively as physical health, many Americans — even those with health insurance — still face financial obstacles when seeking care. “It’s simple: It shouldn’t be harder for you to get care when you feel depressed than getting care when you have back pain,” Lisa Gomez, the assistant secretary for employee benefits security at the U.S. Department of Labor, said at a press conference. “It shouldn’t be harder for you to find a provider that can treat your eating disorder than it is to find a provider that can treat your ulcer.” STAT Read more
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Is "Crisis" Thinking About Youth Mental Health Doing More Harm Than Good?
Crisis. Fatalistic. Overwhelming. That’s how some experts say the current national conversation about youth mental health is framed — and counter to its goal, that lens is hurting the ability to find solutions that help adolescents better weather mental health struggles. They spoke during a media briefing on youth mental health organized by the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit that studies how people think about social issues. One of the biggest challenges to making communities that are overall better for youth mental health is the very way the issue is talked about, says Nat Kendall-Taylor, CEO of the FrameWorks Institute and a psychological anthropologist. Conversations tend to focus on how individual choices students make can impact their mental health, he says, rather than on how systemic problems and the environments where teens live contribute to stress on adolescents. They also tend to be fatalistic and focus on the crisis nature of the problem, Kendall-Taylor adds, and paint teens as a kind of “other” social group that’s detached from their communities. EdSource Read more
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Does Text Therapy Really Work?
More than a decade ago, Thomas Derrick Hull, a clinical psychologist who researches digital health, had what felt like a wild thought. What if therapists, who can’t keep up with demand for mental-health care in the U.S., started texting their patients instead of making them come into the office? Back then, it seemed unlikely even to Hull that patients and providers could use a screen to forge the bonds and meaningful conversations that blossom face-to-face. But the benefits were appealing: texting is cheap, fast, accessible, and easy to do on the fly, potentially allowing therapists to have regular interactions with their patients rather than waiting for a weekly session. So Hull began studying the efficacy of text-based care, eventually doing so as an executive at the online therapy provider Talkspace. (He left the company in 2020 and now works for a digital wellness startup.) Even if texting turned out to be only 60% or 70% as effective as traditional therapy, the convenience and accessibility could make it a better-than-nothing option, Hull used to think. “That felt like a fair trade,” Hull says. “But as we started looking at the data, it turned out that it seemed to be just as effective.” Time Read more
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Fentanyl Crisis/Drug Trends | | |
San Francisco Is Deporting Migrants To Fight Fentanyl Crisis
San Francisco has long celebrated its progressive values and immigration sanctuary policies. A deadly fentanyl crisis is testing its commitment to those ideals. Open-air drug markets dot a downtown already struggling to recover from the pandemic. A record number of people died from overdoses last year. Faced with a deepening emergency, city leaders have quietly embraced a controversial tactic to combat the epidemic: deportation. More than 100 people, mostly undocumented immigrants, have been charged in a federal crackdown on San Francisco’s open-air drug markets since last year, according to a review of cases and data from the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California. Those prosecuted under the program are often given a stark choice between risking lengthy prison sentences or pleading guilty, which avoids major prison time and frequently leads them to face deportation proceedings. Mercury News
Read more
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Deadlier Drugs, Younger Addiction And No Help In Sight
Seventeen-year-old Maddy thought she understood what it meant to be invisible. She had, after all, concealed the horrors of her fentanyl addiction for more than a year and a half. In withdrawal, she’d retreat to her bedroom, sweating, vomiting or struggling to control leg tremors. Away from her mom’s gaze, she’d hide in her family’s backyard shed to use. When she finally tried to get help, her young age made her invisible to the treatment system, too. After Maddy told her mom, Sabrina, about her addiction, they packed 10 days’ worth of Maddy’s clothes and drove to the nearest pediatric hospital. Sabrina assumed Seattle Children’s doctors would recognize how urgently her daughter needed care. That Maddy would be admitted for inpatient treatment, get a detox bed or at least a referral to rehab. Seattle Times Read more
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Exercise May Help You Store Fat Better, New Research Suggests
Exercise doesn’t just help you lose fat. It could also promote healthier fat, according to a new study. “Living a physically active lifestyle, exercising regularly over time, makes our fat tissue a more accommodating place for extra energy under conditions when we do gain weight,” said senior study author Dr. Jeffrey Horowitz, professor of movement studies in the school of kinesiology at the University of Michigan. To see how exercise impacts fat tissue, researchers compared fat tissue just under the skin from two groups of 16 people with obesity: those who reported exercising at least four times a week for at least 2 years, and those who did not exercise regularly, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Metabolism. CNN Read more
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About Eden Health District | | |
The Eden Health District Board of Directors are Chair Pam Russo, Vice Chair Ed Hernandez, Secretary/Treasurer Roxann Lewis, Mariellen Faria and Surlene Grant. The Chief Executive Officer is Mark Friedman.
The Eden Health District is committed to ensuring that policy makers and community members receive accurate and timely information to help make the best policy and personal choices to meet and overcome the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other health issues.
We welcome your feedback on our bulletin. Please contact editor Lisa Mahoney.
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