CBS8.com: More Than 1,000 Students Absent, Suspected Respiratory Outbreak Under Investigation At 2 San Diego County Schools
San Diego County Public Health Services is investigating a large, suspected outbreak of respiratory and flu-like symptoms reported among students at Patrick Henry High School and Del Norte High School. School officials said the symptoms were mostly fever, cough and headache. (Handy, 10/13)

Los Angeles Times: Nearly 40% Of Students Absent At San Diego School As Wave Of Illness Signals Fierce Flu Season
Dr. Cameron Kaiser, a deputy public health officer for San Diego County, said his office is monitoring the outbreak due to its sheer size. No school has come close to seeing 40% of its student body call out sick during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Sisson, 10/13)

NBC News: Flu Off To An Early Start As CDC Warns About Potentially Severe Season
"We've noted that flu activity is starting to increase across much of the country," especially in the Southeast and south-central U.S., the CDC's director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, told NBC News. (Edwards, 10/13)

Bloomberg: New Vaccine Against Respiratory Syncytial Virus Is 83% Effective In Older Adults
The experimental shot against respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, protected volunteers against a disease that causes hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations each year in a key trial. GSK said it plans to submit it for approval in the second half. (Fourcade, 10/13)

Bay Area Reporter: CA And SF Further Expand MPX Vaccine Eligibility 
The San Francisco Department of Public Health issued an advisory October 12 in conjunction with the California Department of Public Health's recent vaccine eligibility expansion which, if anything, puts a finer point on who is most in need of access to the MPX Jynneos vaccine, which requires two doses, about a month apart. San Francisco DPH identified three specific groups to be targeted: people living with HIV; people who are taking, or who are eligible to take, PrEP for HIV prevention; and clinicians who are likely to collect laboratory specimens from people with MPX. (Burkett, 10/13)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Monkeypox Cases Drop Significantly, But Full Vaccination Lags 
As has been the case nationwide, the rate of new monkeypox infections in San Diego County has continued to fall since early August, with the region’s most recent update showing the weekly totals falling to just 4 last week. (Sisson, 10/13)

Times of San Diego: Local COVID-19 Case Count For Week Falls Below 2,000 Amid Slowing Trend 
San Diego County public health officials on Thursday reported 1,855 new COVID-19 cases over the past week, along with nine more deaths. The numbers cover cases recorded over the seven-day period that ended Monday. (10/13)

Yahoo News: The Next U.S. COVID Wave Is Coming. Why It Will Be 'Much Weirder Than Before'
The orderly succession of individually dominant variants we’ve come to expect over the last two years — think Alpha, then Beta, then Delta, then Omicron — may also be a thing of the past. Instead, what scientists are seeing now is a bunch of worrisome Omicron descendants arising simultaneously but independently in different corners of the globe — all with the same set of advantageous mutations that help them dodge our existing immune defenses and drive new waves of infection. Experts call this “convergent evolution” — and right now, there’s a “fairly unprecedented amount” of it going on, according to Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. (Romano, 10/13)

KQED: Where Can I Find A New COVID Booster Shot Near Me — Now Including Kids 5 And Up?
New Moderna and Pfizer booster shots of the reformulated COVID-19 vaccine are now available, following a review process from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The updated shots, called bivalent vaccines, target both the original strain of the coronavirus and the widespread BA.4/BA.5 omicron subvariants that have largely evaded previous boosters. (Severn, 10/13)

CNBC: U.S. Extends Covid Public Health Emergency
The U.S. has extended the Covid public health emergency through Jan. 11, a clear demonstration that the Biden administration still views Covid as a crisis despite President Joe Biden’s recent claim that the pandemic is over. (Kimball, 10/13)

USA Today: New COVID Booster's Human Trial Reveals Safe, Effective Results
Pfizer and its partner BioNTech announced Thursday that they now have data in adults one week after a 30-microgram booster that targets both variants. It is called a bivalent vaccine because it addresses two variants. Two groups of 40 adults each, one age 18-55 and the other over 55, both tolerated the new shot as well as earlier ones and had no unexpected side effects. (Weintraub, 10/13)

CNN: Poor Mental Health In US Teens Exacerbated By Negative Experiences During Covid-19 Pandemic, Survey Finds 
A new study from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that most adolescents experienced negative events during the Covid-19 pandemic – and those experiences were linked to higher prevalence of poor mental health and suicide attempts. Nearly three-quarters of high school students in the US reported experiencing at least one adverse childhood experience in 2021, such as physical abuse, emotional abuse, food insecurity or loss of a parent’s job during the Covid-19 pandemic. Also included were electronic bullying, dating violence and sexual violence. (McPhillips, 10/13)

The Bakersfield Californian: Memorial Hospital Heralds Donations Toward Pediatric Surgery Center 
Local families with children in medical need will have less reason to travel two hours north or south for surgery after an announcement Thursday that local charitable organizations have put up the millions of dollars needed to open a pediatric surgical center at Memorial Hospital. (Cox, 10/13)

Los Angeles Times: L.A. County Launches Mobile Clinics As Big As Semis 
The Department of Health Services launched its own system of rolling clinics this fall, expanding the range of medical care that its clinicians can immediately offer to unhoused people. The big blue trucks, each equipped with a pair of private examination rooms, boast a range of services that can be difficult or impossible to perform on a sidewalk or inside a tent. (Reyes, 10/13)

KQED: Amid Surge In Violent Crime, Oakland Mayor Calls For A Federal Health Emergency
A rash of gun violence in Oakland should be treated as a public health crisis so the city can receive federal aid to support its violence prevention work, Mayor Libby Schaaf said Wednesday. After meeting with U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, Oakland Congressmember Barbara Lee and community leaders to discuss the problem, Schaaf praised the idea of declaring a federal health emergency to bolster Medi-Cal reimbursements for violence prevention initiatives. (Nguyen, 10/13)

San Francisco Chronicle: California’s Deadly Fentanyl Crisis Is Reaching Into New Communities — Far From San Francisco
Drug overdose deaths in California involving the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl increased 45% between 2020 and 2021, but it wasn’t just San Francisco contributing to that spike. Fentanyl-involved overdose deaths also increased in the smaller and more rural counties of the state. In Butte County, for example, the number of fentanyl overdose deaths jumped sevenfold from just six in 2020 to 42 in 2021, according to preliminary data from the California Overdose Surveillance Dashboard. (Jung, 10/14)

San Francisco Chronicle: How California Fails To Regulate The Gun Ranges Leaving Toxic Waste In Their Wake
In June 2017, California health and safety officials acting on a tip from a concerned parent called up the Facebook page of a gun range in Grass Valley (Nevada County) operated by a local Boy Scout leader. They found photos of about a dozen boys, some as young as 11, garbed in various pieces of ill-fitting protective equipment and inadequate masks, sifting through mounds of sand to dig out bits of spent ammunition: fragments of toxic lead left from rounds fired by patrons. Some Scouts’ uncovered shoes were immersed in the contaminated sand. Only specially trained and outfitted adult workers are allowed to do this job, according to state and federal laws. (Rubin, 10/14)

KCRA: The Veteran Art Project Helps California Vets With Mental Health
VETART is a community-based arts organization that serves veterans, active-duty military members, spouses, dependents, and their caregivers through art programming. That programming, which includes free art classes, is intended to help veterans transition from military to civilian life and to help veterans who are struggling with PTSD, depression, and other mental health issues. (Hope, 10/12)

Axios: Minority Patients With Diabetes Likelier To Advance To Kidney Disease
Despite recent progress, there's still a high incidence of chronic kidney disease among adults with diabetes, particularly in minority communities, a new analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine finds. (Dreher, 10/13)

The Washington Post: Hotter Days Bring Out Hotter Tempers, Research Finds 
Two recent studies add to the idea by showing that when it gets hot out, people are more prone to hate speech and hostile behavior. One study found hate speech on social media escalated with high temperatures. Another reported an increase in workplace harassment and discrimination at the U.S. Postal Service when the temperature eclipsed 90 degrees. (Ajasa, 10/13)

The Mercury News: Why A Bay Area Catholic Doctor Supports Abortion Choice
In 1969, during my third year of medical training at Bellevue, the historic public general hospital in New York City, abortion was illegal. Those who provided abortion were criminals. (Dr. Julia Walsh, 10/13)

The Mercury News: Californians Don't Need Another Addiction Crisis. Reject Prop. 27
I once treated a young physician who described to me how, while in medical school, he became addicted to online sports betting. It began with the occasional recreational bet on a professional sports team, progressed to daily betting, and became problematic when online gambling became available. He eventually gambled away the trust fund he had inherited to pay for medical school. Too ashamed to tell his parents, he took out a medical school loan to replace the money he had lost. He gambled that away too. (Dr. Anna Lembke, 10/11)

The Wall Street Journal: California To Doctors: Agree With Us Or Shut Up
The law’s real purpose is to silence doctors who disagree with the public-health establishment on controversial subjects on which there is substantial disagreement. One example is Covid vaccines for children, which most public-health officials recommend but the science is far from certain. (10/11)

CalMatters: Closing Medi-Cal's Digital Divide Is Key To Health Equity 
Those on the ground caring for Medi-Cal patients—the small health care practices, behavioral health and safety net clinics, skilled nursing facilities, county health and human services, and hospitals that form the safety net—need help sharing meaningful patient information to improve health and reduce health disparities. (Mimi Hall and John Helvey, 10/12)

Los Angeles Times: Column One: Why This UCLA Professor Is Studying Female Animals To Gain Insights Into Women's Health
Zainabu was in good health in the days before she gave birth to her fourth baby, despite the fact that her blood pressure was likely somewhere around 280/220. For a human, such a reading would be catastrophic. Spiking blood pressure in a pregnant or recently postpartum woman is a sign of pre-eclampsia, a common but potentially fatal condition that can affect the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys. (Purtill, 10/14)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Seven Years After Getting A Heart Transplant, I Competed In The Transplant Games 
When Jeff Traegeser, interim president of the San Diego nonprofit Lifesharing, stood before the Transplant Games of America crowd during the opening ceremony at the San Diego Convention Center on July 29, he eloquently shared his thoughts. (Darla Calvet, 10/11)