KQED: Court Lifts Restrictions On SF Encampment Sweeps
A federal appeals court on Monday granted San Francisco greater freedom to sweep homeless encampments. The decision comes after last month’s Supreme Court ruling expanded cities’ power to police homelessness. In December 2022, U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu ordered an injunction barring San Francisco from enforcing laws against public camping without first offering a shelter bed — part of the ongoing lawsuit against the city over its homelessness policies. (Rancaño, 7/8)

San Diego Union-Tribune: San Diego’s Proposed Warehouse Shelter Would Be One Of The Largest Nationwide. How Do The Others Work? 
The warehouse sits empty a little north of the airport. The San Diego City Council has debated for months, mostly behind closed doors, whether to convert the property into a homeless shelter, and while many details remain undecided, proponents have repeatedly returned to one part of the plan that would set the facility apart from almost all others: More than 1,000 people could live inside. (Nelson, 7/7)

LAist: Latino Homelessness
Local officials cheered the results of last week’s LAHSA point-in-time count, which showed fewer unhoused people sleeping outdoors in L.A. But for unhoused Latinos, the region's largest unhoused population, little has changed, and finding solutions remains a challenge. Why it matters: Homeless service providers and experts say Latinos at risk of losing their housing, or who are already unhoused, face unique challenges. This is especially true for immigrants who lack legal status. These include wage theft, a lack of available resources for undocumented immigrants, and reluctance to seek assistance. (Rojas, 7/9)

San Francisco Chronicle: ‘Help Us, We Can't Breathe’: Inmate At California Women’s Prison Dies During Heat Wave
A woman incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla died Saturday during a statewide heat wave and prisoner advocates are blaming her death on heat exhaustion. (Mishanec, 7/8)

CalMatters: The Human And Economic Toll Of Extreme Heat In California
A blistering California heat wave over the past week and through the Fourth of July holiday could be topped off by the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth. That kind of extreme heat has led to more deaths than wildfires and cost billions of dollars over a decade, according to the state insurance department. Following through on a mandate from 2022, a new report from the department looked at seven extreme heat events in the state from 2013 to 2022 and found they took the lives of several hundred Californians. (Sumagaysay, 7/8)

NBC News: Health Risks Linked To Extreme Heat Linger Even As Temperatures Drop
Heat accumulates over time in people’s bodies, and the risk of a heart attack, heatstroke or other medical ailment often rises over time. Some experts said medical risks due to heat often trail behind the rise in temperatures — but spike as the days of risk add up. “Usually you see deaths from heat waves not from the first day, but on the second and third day,” said Dr. Lisa Patel, a clinical associate professor who practices as a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. (Bush, 7/8)

Becker's Hospital Review: Sutter Workers Approve First Contract
Members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, who went on strike twice over the past year at the Sutter Center for Psychiatry in Sacramento, Calif., have approved their first labor contract. (Gooch, 7/8)

CalMatters: A UC Merced Medical Program Is Slowly Taking Shape. Why California Wants More Doctors There
A hospital closure in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley a year and a half ago underscored something that people in the region have long known: They don’t have enough doctors or access to medical care. (Ibarra, 7/8)

Modern Healthcare: Where Health Management Graduates Are Taking Jobs
Graduates from health administration master's programs most often go on to work for hospitals or health systems, but other sectors also attract their interest. The Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education examined placement of 2022-23 graduates from select residential, non-executive track full-time programs. The analysis found that after hospitals and systems, most graduates went to consulting firms and physician practice management positions. (Broderick, 7/8)

NBC News: Nearly Half Of U.S. Counties Don't Have A Single Cardiologist
Millions of Americans likely to develop and die from heart disease live in cardiology deserts — areas of the country without a single heart specialist to care for them. New research published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology finds that nearly half of all counties in the U.S. lack a practicing cardiologist. Most of those counties are rural, with residents who tend to be sicker in general with complex medical problems. (Edwards, 7/8)

Military.com: More Than Three-Fourths Of Tricare Directories' Mental Health Provider Listings Are Inaccurate, Report Finds
A federal watchdog has determined that most of the mental health provider listings in Tricare network directories are inaccurate or outdated, a problem that could prevent military service members and families from getting vital behavioral health care. The Government Accountability Office estimated that 85% of listings in the Tricare East Region and 79% in the Tricare West Region had troubles with location, gender of the provider, specialty or subspecialty descriptions, or phone and fax numbers. (Kime, 7/8)

Modern Healthcare: Hospital Credit Ratings Dip In 2024 Despite Some Improvements
Credit ratings downgrades continue to hit some hospitals and health systems despite their efforts to stabilize finances in a challenging economy. In the first half of 2024, more than 30 hospitals and health systems were downgraded by at least one of the three largest credit rating agencies — Fitch Ratings, Moody's Ratings and S&P Global. The agencies noted challenges such as inflated expenses, including high labor costs, and reimbursement rate negotiations as factors leading to financial stress. (Hudson and Broderick, 7/8)

Modern Healthcare: Hospital-At-Home Receives Positive Opinions In New Survey
More than half of people surveyed would feel just as safe getting hospital-level care at home as they would in a facility, according to the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. Healthcare systems across the country are placing big bets on hospital-at-home programs, pushing access to more rural communities and lobbying state Medicaid programs to reimburse for the service. (Eastabrook, 7/8)

Los Angeles Times: How Beverly Hills Became An Unlikely Abortion Rights Battleground 
Emma Craig was outside the Beverly Hills Medical Center on Wilshire Boulevard, spoiling for a fight. Armed with a bullhorn, sidewalk chalk and “giant photos of dead babies,” the Bay Area art teacher and antiabortion activist had arrived with her confederates last summer to pray and protest against a clinic seeking to expand its services to California amid a flurry of national restrictions on reproductive care. (Sharp, 7/9)

The Wall Street Journal: Republicans Adopt Stripped-Down Platform That Reflects Trump’s Abortion Views 
Republicans released a party platform on Monday that was much shorter and less detailed than those of the past, sidestepping many policy specifics and the potential internal fights that could have been triggered by a more detailed document. The 16-page platform makes only brief mention of abortion, long a top issue for the GOP. It softens language included in a 2016 version of the document that called for a constitutional amendment making clear that fetuses have due process rights. Instead of calling for a “human life amendment,” the new platform states that the 14th Amendment “guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process, and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights.” (Restuccia and McCormik, 7/8)

Politico: Trump’s Platform Changed The GOP’s Position On Abortion. Not Everyone Is Happy. 
A small but vocal contingent on the right is frustrated with the new Republican Party platform. There isn’t much they can do about it. Even as anti-abortion groups largely lined up behind former President Donald Trump’s platform on Monday, some prominent and rank-and-file evangelicals criticized the language for backpedaling on the GOP’s longstanding promise to use the federal government to stop abortion. (Messerly and Sentner, 7/8)

The Washington Post: Project 2025, Pushed By Trump Allies, Is Focus Of Democrats’ Attacks 
President Biden and other Democrats are increasingly focusing their attacks on an aggressive right-wing agenda called Project 2025 that is being pushed by allies of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump — prompting Trump and his team to lash out in recent days at supporters of the effort. Many Democrats have assessed that the best message for their candidate — whether it is Biden, who is trailing in polls and facing calls to drop out after a damaging debate performance, or another candidate — is to focus on what Trump might do in a second term, particularly as it relates to abortion rights, retribution against his enemies, mass deportations and the environment. (Dawsey and Knowles, 7/8)

AP: Support For Legal Abortion Has Risen Since Dobbs, AP-NORC Poll Finds
A solid majority of Americans oppose a federal abortion ban as a rising number support access to abortions for any reason, a new poll finds, highlighting a politically perilous situation for candidates who oppose abortion rights as the November election draws closer. Around 6 in 10 Americans think their state should generally allow a person to obtain a legal abortion if they don’t want to be pregnant for any reason, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s an increase from June 2021, a year before the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to the procedure, when about half of Americans thought legal abortion should be possible under these circumstances. (Fernando and Thomson-Deveaux, 7/9)

NPR: White House Doctor Says Neurological Exams Were Part Of Biden's Routine Physicals
The White House physician says a neurological specialist has only visited President Biden as part of routine physicals, following questions about Biden’s fitness for office. Other visits by the specialist to the White House were to treat military personnel who experience neurological issues related to their service, the White House physician added in a letter issued on Monday. (7/8)

The New York Times: Parkinson’s Expert Visited The White House Eight Times In Eight Months 
An expert on Parkinson’s disease from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center visited the White House eight times in eight months from last summer through this spring, including at least once for a meeting with President Biden’s physician, according to official visitor logs. The expert, Dr. Kevin Cannard, is a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders and recently published a paper on Parkinson’s. The logs, released by the White House, document visits from July 2023 through March of this year. More recent visits, if there have been any, would not be released until later under the White House’s voluntary disclosure policy. (Baumgaertner and Baker, 7/8)

The Wall Street Journal: How Biden’s Inner Circle Worked To Keep Signs Of Aging Under Wraps 
Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history. The White House has limited Biden’s daily itinerary and shielded him from impromptu exchanges. Advisers have restricted news conferences and media appearances, twice declining Super Bowl halftime interviews—an easy way to reach millions of voters—and sought to make sure meetings with donors stuck to scripted pleasantries.  (Restuccia, Linskey, Glazer, Ballhaus and Schwartzel, 7/8)

CIDRAP: Young People's Mental Health Suffered Amid COVID Pandemic, 3 New Studies Suggest 
The COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdowns harmed the mental health of Canadian and US youth, exacerbating depression, anxiety, and eating disorders among certain groups, according to a trio of new studies published in JAMA journals. (Van Beusekom, 7/8)

Fierce Biotech: Cancer Drug From Lab Of Bankrupt Biotech Works Against COVID-19 And MRSA Lung Damage In Mice
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have published new findings that show an experimental cancer drug developed by a now-bankrupt biotech can suppress the virus in lung tissue. In a July 3 article in Science Translational Medicine, the UCSD team established that levels of damage-causing immune cells called myeloid cells are raised in the lungs of people with COVID-19 and other infections, like methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). (Floersh, 7/9)

USA Today: Chicken Recall: Frozen Al-Safa Products Recalled For Listeria Risk
More than 2,000 pounds of frozen chicken meals are being recalled nationwide for risk of listeria poisoning. Al-Safa US has recalled 2,010 pounds of imported frozen ready-to-eat chicken products that may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, according to a notice shared Friday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). (Walrath-Holdridge, 7/8)

Reuters: Bird Flu Strain In US Cows Shows Minimal Air Spread In Ferret Study 
The bird flu strain found in cows in the United States is not easily transmitted through the air among ferrets, a new study shows, although the scientist who led the work said it had shown some ability to spread this way. Ferrets are considered to be the best small mammal for studying influenza virus infection and transmission, and are often used to inform assessments of the public health risks of emerging viruses. (Rigby, 7/8)

San Francisco Chronicle: Tampons Contain Toxic Metals Such As Lead, UC Berkeley Study Reveals
A wide range of off-the-shelf tampons contain more than a dozen toxic metals, including lead and arsenic, a new UC Berkeley study found, raising concerns for millions of women who use these sanitary products. The findings, published in the Environmental International journal on July 3, call for stringent regulatory measures to mandate metal testing in menstrual products. (Vaziri, 7/8)

The New York Times: Children With Autism Carry Unique Gut Flora, Study Finds 
A study published Monday in Nature Microbiology bolsters a growing body of research that suggests an unlikely path to more objective autism diagnoses: the gut microbiome. After analyzing more than 1,600 stool samples from children ages 1 to 13, researchers found several distinct biological “markers” in the samples of autistic children. Unique traces of gut bacteria, fungi, viruses and more could one day be the basis of a diagnostic tool, said Qi Su, a researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a lead author of the study. (Rosenbluth, 7/8)