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Stay Well
breaking health news & updates
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What’s The Secret To Healthy Aging? Scientists Believe These "Superagers" May Hold The Answer | |
When 97-year-old Charlotte Goode is asked about her age, she throws up her hands and laughs.
“This is ridiculous,” said the Albany resident, who grew up during the Great Depression, married right after World War II and has outlived all three of her siblings. “Aging really is not something I thought very much about. I really don’t know why I’m still here.”
Scientists, though, are very interested in how Goode has been able to reach such an advanced age in good health. And they think the answer may lie in her genes.
Goode and about 500 other so-called “superagers” — those 95 and older who are generally healthy — are part of an ongoing nationwide study seeking to better understand the role of genetics in healthy aging.
The research could help drugmakers identify targets for treatments and therapies to help those who don’t inherit longevity genes to live longer, healthier lives. SF Chronicle Read more
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“If you’re going into the doctor’s office, if you’re going in to visit somebody at a hospital or if you’re taking care of someone who is sick, then I would suggest that you wear a mask.”
Kismet Baldwin-Santana, Health Officer for San Mateo County
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Mask Mandates Are Back At Bay Area Health Care Facilities
As fall brings the start of respiratory illness season, mask mandates are coming back to health care facilities across the Bay Area.
The mandates in health care settings returned Friday — some just for health care personnel and others for patients and visitors — in Alameda, Santa Clara, San Mateo and Contra Costa counties.
The mandates are aimed at reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses such as influenza, COVID-19 and RSV, which can be particularly harmful for some people. For the flu and COVID, those 65 or older, pregnant or immunocompromised people or people with conditions such as asthma, diabetes, heart disease or obesity are most at risk. With RSV, people 75 and older face the greatest danger, while those above the age of 60, who live in nursing homes or have conditions such as diabetes, heart or lung disease or obesity are also at risk.
Though masks are only mandatory in health care settings, people should consider whether it’s a step they want to take in other settings to protect themselves, their families and their friends, said Kismet Baldwin-Santana, the health officer for San Mateo County. Mercury News Read more
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How to Cope with Post Election Anxiety
In the unpredictable environment of the 2024 presidential election, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed or anxious. The tension is real, but you don’t have to face it alone. Crisis Text Line is here to offer support. Simply text ELECTION to 741741 to reach a live volunteer crisis counselor in English. Para apoyo en español envía la palabra ELECCIONES al 741741.
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Oakland ZIP Code Of Bay Area Has Less Sufficient Sleep
At his Oakland home within earshot of the Coliseum sports arena and the BART tracks, Michale Jones said he usually sleeps just five hours each night. On top of the periodic rattle of the transit trains and roar of sports fans, there’s the intrusion of illicit activities that keep him awake. “I always hear a lot of the gunshots, a lot of music playing, side shows and lots of other stuff like that at night and even midnight every day,” Jones said. Jones might get a little relief Sunday when daylight-saving time ends at 2 a.m. across most U.S. states and clocks “fall back” an hour to standard time, granting an extra 60 minutes to sleep in. But it may not prove much of a break for Jones and his neighbors, whose ZIP code (94621) stood out as having the highest percentage of “short sleep duration” in the Bay Area at 41.2%, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest 2024 PLACES: Local Data for Better Health report.
East Bay Times Read more
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California Regulators Slap Bay Area Refinery With Record Penalty After "Egregious" Long-Term Leak Of Toxic Pollutants
Regional and state air quality regulators handed Valero Refining Co. a nearly $82 million penalty for “egregious” emissions problems at its Benicia refinery, which for 16 years spewed illegal amounts of cancer-causing gases and chemicals into the air. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District and California Air Resources Board, in an announcement Thursday, said that from 2003 to 2019 Valero’s hydrogen stacks churned out tons of harmful organic chemicals each day in amounts more than 360 times the legal limit. Valero management knew about the emissions problems “but did not report them or take any steps to prevent them,” officials said.
SF Chronicle Read more
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Berkeley Startup Wins Government Award To Develop Radiation And Lead Poisoning Treatment
Whether its lead from old buildings, arsenic from contaminated food or strontium fallout from a nuclear explosion, heavy metals that enter the body pose a serious health threat. With chemical properties exceedingly similar to typical nutrients like iron and calcium, toxic metals look virtually the same to the body. So, it starts incorporating the toxic elements into the skeleton, liver and brain. Saving a patient requires removing the sparse toxic metals from the body with more than surgical precision, while leaving the abundant life-sustaining nutrients intact. For many toxic elements, doctors have few options. Now, a startup spun out of UC Berkeley and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory hopes to change that. LA Times Read more
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Do I Have COVID, The Flu Or Something Else? 2024 Symptoms And Testing To Know
Breaking out the tissues? It's that time of year! But what kind of sickness do your symptoms point to? As the weather changes, we can start feeling under the weather too — but while each illness has a typical set of symptoms, it's important to understand you can't diagnose on your own, Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, said. "If you come in with some symptoms of cough or sore throat or runny nose, whatever it is, I can't tell you if that's a cold, if it's walking pneumonia, if it's COVID or the flu. You do need to test," she said. The good news? Tests are available. "Since the pandemic, we now have tests that cover all the most common viral and bacterial respiratory infections, making it easy to test for all with one swab," Gounder said. CBS News Read more
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You May Not Need To Throw Out Those "Expired" COVID-19 Home Tests
Four free home COVID-19 antigen tests are available to order at COVIDTests.gov, part of the seventh round of the federal government’s test-distribution program. And although this round of test orders has been going on for only a month, some people have reported that some tests are nearing their expiration date. It may be tempting to throw away those tests or other Covid-19 home test kits that are labeled near their expiration dates, but the US Food and Drug Administration is encouraging people to check its website for extensions before possibly throwing away perfectly good tests. These antigen tests, often called rapid tests, detect proteins called antigens from the virus that causes Covid-19. They can provide positive or negative test results within minutes in your own home. The FDA says shelf life is “how long the test should work as expected and is measured from the date the test was manufactured.” The expiration date is “set at the end of the shelf-life and is the date through which the test is expected to perform as accurately as when manufactured.” CNN Read more
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An Idaho Health Department Isn’t Allowed To Give COVID-19 Vaccines Anymore. Experts Say It’s A First
A regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing COVID-19 vaccines to residents in six counties after a narrow decision by its board. Southwest District Health appears to be the first in the nation to be restricted from giving COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccinations are an essential function of a public health department. While policymakers in Texas banned health departments from promoting COVID vaccines and Florida’s surgeon general bucked medical consensus to recommend against the vaccine, governmental bodies across the country haven’t blocked the vaccines outright. “I’m not aware of anything else like this,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials. She said health departments have stopped offering the vaccine because of cost or low demand, but not based on “a judgment of the medical product itself.” AP Read more
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State/National/International News | | |
Tuberculosis Cases Hit Record High: WHO
A record 8.2 million new tuberculosis cases were diagnosed worldwide last year, the World Health Organization said -- the highest number since it began global TB monitoring in 1995. he WHO said its Global Tuberculosis Report 2024, released Tuesday, highlights "mixed progress in the global fight against TB, with persistent challenges such as significant underfunding". While the number of TB-related deaths declined from 1.32 million in 2022 to 1.25 million last year, the total number of people contracting the infectious disease increased from 7.5 million to 8.2 million. However, not all new cases are diagnosed, and WHO estimates that around 10.8 million people actually contracted the disease last year. Raw Story Read more
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An "Unprecedented" Good News Story About A Potentially Deadly Viral Outbreak
Marburg virus is notorious for its killing ability. In past outbreaks, as many as 9 out of 10 patients have died from the disease. And there are no approved vaccines or medications. That was the grim situation in Rwanda just over a month ago, when officials made the announcement that nobody wants to make: The country was in the midst of its first Marburg outbreak. Now those same Rwandan officials have better news to share. Remarkably better. “We are at a case fatality rate of 22.7% — probably among the lowest ever recorded [for a Marburg outbreak],” said Dr. Yvan Butera, the Rwandan Minister of State for Health at a press conference hosted by Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday. NPR Read more
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Researchers Say An AI-Powered Transcription Tool Used In Hospitals Invents Things No One Ever Said
Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.” But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments. Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos. AP Read more
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Dentists Are Pulling "Healthy" And Treatable Teeth To Profit From Implants, Experts Warn
Becky Carroll was missing a few teeth, and others were stained or crooked. Ashamed, she smiled with lips pressed closed. Her dentist offered to fix most of her teeth with root canals and crowns, Carroll said, but she was wary of traveling a long road of dental work. Then Carroll saw a TV commercial for another path: ClearChoice Dental Implant Centers. The company advertises that it can give patients “a new smile in as little as one day” by surgically replacing teeth instead of fixing them. So Carroll saved and borrowed for the surgery, she said. In an interview and a lawsuit, Carroll said that at a ClearChoice clinic in New Jersey in 2021, she agreed to pay $31,000 to replace all her natural upper teeth with pearly-white prosthetic ones. What came next, Carroll said, was “like a horror movie.” KFF Health News Read more
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Caregivers Suffer From Isolation And Stress And Often Find Little Support
Dawn Shedrick is matter-of-fact about the heartbreaks of caregiving. She is clear and calm when she describes its hardships and grief. She has looked after her mother, who has multiple sclerosis, for more than 30 years. She has been through a lot, and she keeps going. There’s only one thing that puts the catch in her voice. The tears don’t come when she tells the story of her mom’s diagnosis of MS, a disease that attacks the nervous system and can cause blindness, dizziness, painful muscle spasms and mental fog, even paralysis. It’s not when she talks about moving back home, and putting her plans for graduate school in California on ice. It’s not even when she describes her mom’s recent crises — three hospital stays and a terrifying near-miss with sepsis, which can quickly turn fatal. When she tells her story of love and endurance, the only time that Dawn Shedrick’s voice tightens is when she talks about the isolation she felt, and about all the other caregivers who dwell there in those lonely shadows. For decades, she held it together, put on a brave face. She watched her mother struggle, and kept the sorrow to herself. NPR Read more
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To Mitigate Drug Shortages, A New Study Suggests Looking At Canada
Of 104 reports of supply chain issues with dozens of drugs, meaningful shortages were 40% less likely to occur in Canada than in the U.S., a new study found, and the difference was largely attributed to the approach taken by the Canadian government to the problem. Between 2017 and 2021, regulators in the U.S. and Canada received the same number of reports about actual or potential shortages for the same 96 medicines. Within a year, 49% of the 104 related reports received by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were associated with a meaningful shortage, but only 34% of the reports for the same drugs filed with Health Canada reached that stage, according to the study published in JAMA. STAT Read more
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FDA Approves First Drug That Can Reduce Allergic Reaction After Exposure To Food Allergens
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that an injectable drug called Xolair can now be used to prevent allergic reactions after accidental exposure from allergy-triggering foods. It is the first drug approved by the FDA to reduce the risk of allergic reactions from multiple foods after an accidental exposure. Xolair, which has the generic name omalizumab, came to market in 2003 and has been previously approved to treat asthma, chronic rhinosinusitis, hives, and other conditions. In a clinical trial with 168 individuals, 68% of the participants, who received Xolair, were able to tolerate what amounted to 2.5 peanuts worth of allergen without having a significant allergic reaction. Healthline Read more
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Santa Clara Celebrates The Completion Of Affordable Housing Project For Homeless Young Adults
The County of Santa Clara and partners are celebrating the completion of two affordable housing projects that have created 55 units of affordable housing for young people who are unhoused or at risk of homelessness. The projects reflect the County’s commitment to ending homelessness among families with children as well as youth and young adults. Since October 2021, the County has helped 1,955 families find permanent housing, many of them households headed by young adults who have aged out of foster care. The Heartwood Apartments, located in Mountain View, bring 48 units of affordable housing to northern Santa Clara County, including 13 units of permanent supportive housing for young adults between the ages of 18 and 24. The other units are devoted to families with children and adults who were unhoused or at risk of homelessness. PubicCEO Read more
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State Sues Southern California City That Banned New Homeless Shelters
The state of California filed suit against Norwalk on Monday, alleging the southeastern Los Angeles County city’s moratorium on new homeless shelters and supportive housing violates half a dozen housing laws. “No community should turn its back on its residents in need,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. In August, Norwalk’s City Council passed a law banning the facilities, along with new laundromats, liquor stores and payday lenders, until at least next summer. Council members said the city of 100,000 had been a dumping ground for homeless projects that were straining the budget and leading to disorder. Norwalk’s ban has already led to the cancellation of a hotel leasing effort that county officials believed would have sheltered 80 people. LA Times Read more
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S.F. Is Forcing More Mentally Ill People Into Treatment — But Are They Actually Getting Help?
Last year, San Francisco Mayor London Breed issued a bold order: She directed her administration to aggressively compel more people into involuntary mental health and drug treatment. A new state law had just expanded the population eligible for conservatorship, a sweeping legal arrangement that lets the government make decisions for people deemed unable to care for themselves. Breed wanted San Francisco to take full advantage. Her approach drew praise from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is under pressure to address the mental health crisis on California streets. While Newsom slammed other counties for waiting, he said the expansion in San Francisco and San Luis Obsipo — the only two counties to implement the law in 2024 — would be “critical” and “lifesaving.” But roughly a third of the deputy public conservators who have worked or currently work in San Francisco since the law took effect told the Chronicle it is not delivering on its promises. SF Chronicle Read more
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Winter Is Coming. Here's How To Spot — And Treat — Signs Of Seasonal Depression
The days are getting shorter, darker and colder, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. And while there's a lot to look forward to in winter, it's not necessarily the most wonderful time of the year for everyone. Many people have experienced the "winter blues" in some form or another. But in some cases, those changes in mood, sleep and appetite can be signs of something more serious: a form of depression known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. "It's normal for people to feel a little worse in the winter," says Dr. Paul Desan, director of the Winter Depression Research Clinic at the Yale School of Medicine. "But for some people, these changes are really severe, and they add up to what is equivalent to a clinical episode of major depression." NPR Read more
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Medicare Finalized Coverage For Some Mental Health Apps. Now What?
Medicare regulators on Friday finalized rules to pay for some mental health apps, a breakthrough for digital therapeutics companies that have struggled for a foothold in the health care system. The new rule creates codes that allow clinicians to bill Medicare for providing the apps and related services to their patients. Beginning January 1, 2025, the codes will enable payment for mental health apps authorized by the Food and Drug Administration under a specific regulation that includes just a handful of treatments for conditions like depression and substance use disorder. Developers of digital therapeutics have for years pursued Medicare coverage because it’s viewed as a path to acceptance by the broader health care system. Dozens of companies have convinced the FDA that their digital treatments are safe and effective, and experts believe that technology can help address gaps in mental health care that’s in short supply. STAT Read more
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Fentanyl Crisis/Drug Trends | | |
Mothering Over Meds: Docs Say Common Treatment For Opioid-Exposed Babies Isn’t Necessary
On learning last year she was pregnant with her second child, Cailyn Morreale was overcome with fear and trepidation. “I was so scared,” said Morreale, a resident of the small western North Carolina town of Mars Hill. In that moment, her joy about being pregnant was eclipsed by fear she would have to stop taking buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid withdrawal that had helped counter her addiction. Morreale’s fear was compounded by the rigidity of the most common approach to treating babies born after being exposed in the womb to opioids or some medications used to treat opioid addiction. For decades throughout the opioid crisis, most doctors have relied on medication-heavy regimens to treat babies who are born experiencing neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome. Those protocols often meant separating newborns from their mothers, placing them in neonatal intensive care units, and giving them medications to treat their withdrawal. East Bay Times Read more
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He Wanted To Live. After His Insurance Rejected Coverage, He Died Of A Fentanyl Overdose
Christine Dougherty heard the panic in her son’s voice. “Mom, they’re going to release me soon,” Ryan Matlock told his mother over the phone from his addiction treatment center. She remembered him sounding like he was crying. “I’m not strong enough to do this. I need help.” At 23 years old, Matlock had already overdosed at least once on fentanyl. In this quiet Southern California community dotted with soccer fields and American flags, little blue pills laced with the highly addictive drug were easy enough to obtain. Desperate to save himself, Matlock had begged his health insurance plan to place him in a Palm Desert residential treatment facility that knew how to handle fentanyl addiction. But three days after he arrived at Pacifica Recovery, Matlock’s counselor relayed devastating news. Over the entreaties of his doctor and mother, a psychiatrist reviewing his case on behalf of his health plan had decided Matlock didn’t need to stay there any longer, health records show. CalMatters Read more
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Why Sitting All Day May Shorten Your Life
We’ve all heard that sitting too long is bad for you. We’re not evolved to do it, it can undermine our exercise gains, it causes dead butt syndrome. Sitting might not quite be “the new smoking,” but too much of it can still shorten your life. “Sitting is actually aging you faster,” said Katy Bowman, a biomechanist and author of “My Perfect Movement Plan.” Whether it’s bone or joint health, muscle mass or energy level, she added, “a lot of what you perceive as aging is going to be heavily influenced by your sitting time.” And we spend a lot of time sitting. Numbers vary around how much average Americans sit per day, but it may be as long as nine and a half hours. Studies suggest women sit less than men do, but most agree we all sit more than previous generations did. NY Times 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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