San Diego Union-Tribune: Rady Nurses Reject A Third Contract Proposal 
A two-day strike by the 1,600 nurses at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego did not produce a new contract offer that workers found acceptable. (Sisson, 8/7)

Becker's Hospital Review: Kern Medical Residents Negotiate 30% Raise
Resident physicians and fellows at Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield have approved a new labor agreement with hospital management. The contract, ratified in early August, covers members of the Committee of Interns and Residents. It includes a 30% increase in compensation for incoming residents over three years, according to a union news release shared with Becker's. (Gooch, 8/7)

San Diego Union-Tribune: This San Diego Medtech Company Is Cutting 117 Jobs 
CareFusion, a San Diego company that produces health care tools and technology, is laying off 117 workers to improve its operating efficiency. (Rocha, 8/7)

Becker's Hospital Review: Desert Healthcare District, Tenet Lease Heads To November Ballot
The board of directors for Desert Healthcare District and Foundation voted Aug. 6 to put a 30-year hospital lease purchase agreement with Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare on the Nov. 5 ballot for Coachella Valley, Calif., voters, according to a Desert Healthcare District and Foundation Aug. 6 LinkedIn post. The district and Tenet would enter the new lease agreement for Palm Springs, Calif.-based Desert Regional Medical Center on Dec. 1 should voters approve. The agreement would begin May 31, 2027 and end May 21, 2057. Tenet and the district's existing lease will expire May 30, 2027, the Desert Sun reported Aug. 6. (Ashley, 8/7)

Fresno Bee: Community Health System Sued In Fresno Over Alleged Misuse Of Medi-Cal Money
Two nonprofit groups have sued Fresno’s primary hospital system alleging it diverted state and federal public funding earmarked for its downtown hospital to fund a new hospital project in the wealthier nearby city of Clovis. (Montalvo, 8/7)

Oaklandside: Mam Speakers Are Needed In Bay Area Hospitals. A New Program For Interpreters Has Just The Cure
Yosilin Mendoza has a plan. A few years after immigrating from the Todos Santos region of Guatemala, the 23-year-old Oakland resident wants to become a nurse at one of the region’s top hospitals, preferably working with patients inside emergency rooms on the toughest cases. And while she has a passion for helping everyone who is sick, she wants to help Mam speakers the most. Mendoza is part of a three-person cohort that recently graduated from a local educational program as the country’s first certified Mam health care interpreters. Mam is a Mayan language indigenous to Guatemala whose speakers number, by some estimates, in the tens of thousands in Oakland. (Fermoso, 8/7)

Stat: CMS Finalizes Medicare Coverage Rule For Breakthrough Devices
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has finalized its rule easing reimbursement for medical device makers. Called Transitional Coverage for Emerging Technologies, the program gives device makers with products deemed “breakthrough” technology by the Food and Drug Administration a quicker way to secure Medicare coverage. The agency first introduced the rule last June. (Lawrence, 8/7)

San Diego Union-Tribune: COVID Vaccines Have Become Harder To Find During The Summer Surge 
With a new booster coming soon, getting a dose of the current coronavirus vaccine is growing more difficult in San Diego and in other parts of California. (Sisson, 8/7)

CIDRAP: MIS-C Tied To Rare Autoimmune Overreaction In Some Children
Now scientists from the University of San Francisco, Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and Boston Children's Hospital, have published in Nature new research describing the mechanism behind MIS-C, and suggest the findings could have implications for other autoimmune diseases. (Soucheray, 8/7)

Los Angeles Times: Sale Of Massive Skid Row Homeless Housing Portfolio Approved By Judge
The sale of one of Los Angeles’ largest collections of homeless housing was approved by a judge Wednesday, marking a final step in averting a catastrophic loss of permanent shelter in Skid Row. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Stephen Goorvitch said the $10-million purchase price for 17 buildings to be paid by Beverly Hills developer Leo Pustilnikov was in the best interest of formerly homeless tenants and L.A. taxpayers who had been financing the portfolio’s maintenance and repairs for 16 months. (Dillon, 8/7)

CapRadio: Camp Resolution Residents Plan To Stay, Despite Upcoming Lease Expiration
Residents of a self-governed homeless encampment on Wednesday declared they plan to stay at a lot owned by the city of Sacramento whether or not a judge and nonprofit organization grant their requests. A county judge on Friday is set to hold a hearing on their application for a preliminary injunction preventing the city from closing Camp Resolution until all residents get permanent housing. (Lam, 8/7)

Voice of San Diego: How One Family's World Turned Upside Down
When José, Mercedes and their three children were homeless and unsheltered, they had to find creative ways to avoid sleeping outside on the street. On most weeknights they stayed at a Motel 6 in Oceanside. Rates are typically cheaper on weekdays, they quickly figured out. On weekends, or when they were running low on money, the five of them would sleep in various rental cars. (Layne, 8/8)

Military.com: New Documentary Follows LA Veterans Who Face Homelessness, Hopelessness And Hunger While The VA Fails To Act 
The West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs campus is one of the largest VA campuses in the country, made up of around 388 acres. It was originally given to the federal government at the turn of the 20th century, a donation from a wealthy socialite to house veterans, and was once even a fully functional township with its own post office and trolley system. Along with the health-care services it provided, it once housed as many as 5,000 vets at its post-World War II peak. Today, much of the land is unused, filled with dilapidated buildings left over from its glory days. ... Meanwhile, homeless veterans are camped out in tents outside the facility grounds, prevented from making any kind of home on this land supposedly reserved fort hem. (Stilwell, 8/7)

LAist: LA City Council Committee Forwards Plans To Give Renters Free Eviction Attorneys As A ‘Right’
Los Angeles City Council members have voted to put the “right” back into the city’s proposal for a tenant’s “right to counsel” in eviction court, overriding an earlier draft that dropped the word. In Wednesday’s meeting of the council’s housing committee, Councilmember Nithya Raman — who chairs the committee — introduced an amendment to alter some of the language drafted by the city attorney’s office. The earlier draft had called the effort a “City-Funded Counsel for Tenants Program” and conspicuously said it would not give renters the right to an attorney. (Wagner, 8/8)

KVPR: Valley Fever Is 'Endemic' In Fresno County, As Cases Rise
The caseload of valley fever is rising in Fresno County. The county's department of public health released figures as part of Valley Fever Awareness Month on Wednesday, and says the county has confirmed 540 cases so far this year. (Rodriguez-Delgado, 8/7)

The Mercury News: Lawmaker Wants To Ban California Schools From Serving Food With Red 40, Other Dyes
A state lawmaker from the San Fernando Valley has resumed his push for a bill that would ban public schools in California from serving food or beverages containing synthetic food dyes such as Red 40 that child health advocates say can harm developing brains and cause neurobehavioral problems. (Tat, 8/7)

Los Angeles Times: Jury Finds Stone Companies At Fault In Suit By Countertop Cutter
A Los Angeles County jury found businesses that make or distribute engineered stone at fault Wednesday for the suffering of a 34-year-old stonecutter afflicted with an incurable disease. In a decision watched closely by silicosis experts and the stone industry, jurors deliberating at Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown L.A. decided largely in favor of Gustavo Reyes Gonzalez, who was diagnosed with silicosis and had to undergo a double lung transplant after years of cutting engineered stone countertops. (Alpert Reyes, 8/7)

Berkeleyside: Berkeley Taps Live Free USA For $2M Gun Violence Prevention Task
Berkeley has picked Live Free USA, which began in the East Bay and has spearheaded gun violence prevention programs around the country, for a $2 million, two-year pilot “Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention Program.” City officials announced the pick Tuesday at a press event at the McGee Avenue Baptist Church in South Berkeley, concurrent with a “National Night Out” anti-violence block party. Along with the Oakland-based National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, Live Free will liaise with the church, its Voices Against Violence program and the Berkeley Junior Jackets for some of the program’s outreach and community work. (Gecan, 8/8)

Stat: FDA OK's Purdue Pharma’s New Overdose-Reversal Medication
Purdue Pharma, the company best known for fueling the opioid crisis by misleadingly marketing the infamous painkiller OxyContin, received approval on Wednesday for a new auto-injector device used to reverse opioid overdoses. (Facher, 8/7)

Reuters: US Patients Take Wegovy Obesity Drug For Around Six Months, Novo Nordisk Says 
U.S. patients are on average staying on Novo Nordisk's Wegovy weight-loss medication for just six months, an executive said on Wednesday, attributing the short time to the low availability of the wildly popular drug. (8/7)

The New York Times: More People Are Overdosing on Ozempic Alternatives
Three hours after Becky Cheairs injected herself with the first dose of compounded semaglutide, she started to vomit. Crouched over the toilet, reeling from nausea, she thought there was no way she would make it on the R.V. trip from Arkansas to San Antonio she had planned that weekend. She was right: She spent the next day throwing up at least once an hour. Like many others, Ms. Cheairs, 66, had taken the drug to lose weight. But she hadn’t taken the brand-name products Ozempic or Wegovy, which come in pens pre-filled with a specific dose. (Blum, 8/6)

CNN: Monthly Abortions Continue To Trend Up In The US In 2024, New Report Shows
Despite restrictions and bans that have taken effect in the two years since the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision revoked the federal right to an abortion, the average number of abortions provided each month in the United States continues to rise, a new report shows. (McPhillips, 8/7)

Bloomberg: 1 In 5 US Abortions Are Now Through Telehealth
More women in the US are seeking abortion care through telehealth than before the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, according to a new report. One in five clinician-provided abortions performed in the first quarter of 2024 were obtained through telehealth services, the analysis from abortion advocacy group the Society of Family Planning showed. That contrasts with the second quarter of 2022, during which only one in 20 abortions were obtained through telehealth. (Ceron, 8/7)

The New York Times: Health Officials Urge Doctors To Address IUD Insertion Pain 
In recent years, the process of getting an intrauterine device, or IUD, has become infamous on social media. Videos of women writhing and crying while the T-shaped contraceptive device is inserted have become macabre online staples. “Unless you’re living under a rock, you’re aware of the issue,” said Dr. Beverly Gray, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University. Doctors have been accused of ignoring the discomfort. For the first time, federal health officials recommended on Tuesday that physicians counsel women about pain management before the procedure. (Rosenbluth, 8/7)

Los Angeles Times: Where Kalama Harris And Donald Trump Stand On LGBTQ+ Issues
At a recent celebration of San Francisco’s vibrant transgender past, one speaker after another directed the crowd’s attention to a worrisome future, casting November’s presidential election as a turning point for the LGBTQ+ community and the nation as a whole. “This election will determine our fate,” said Sofía Sabina Ríos Dorantes, deputy director of El/La Para TransLatinas, a local advocacy organization. “It will determine whether we continue to face discrimination and marginalization at [a] disproportionate rate, or whether we can continue walking toward the recognition and respect we deserve.” (Rector, 8/8)

San Francisco Chronicle: Fact Check: GOP Blasts Walz As ‘Tampon Tim’ And ‘Stolen Valor Garbage'
Republicans are trying to define Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz as he’s being introduced to a country where most voters don’t know much about the Minnesota governor and six-term House member. Their approach is to throw a lot of attacks into the ether and see what sticks. Their early salvos are a mixed bag: Walz is “a San Francisco liberal.” He allowed “rioters to burn down the streets of Minneapolis,” in 2020 after the city’s police killed George Floyd. He ducked out early on his military service. And he is “Tampon Tim.” (Burke and Garofoli, 8/7)

CNN: Sweetener In Stevia, Keto Products Linked To Blood Clots, Study Says
Consuming a drink with erythritol — an artificial sweetener used to add bulk to stevia and monk fruit and to sweeten low-carb keto products — more than doubled the risk of blood clotting in 10 healthy people, according to a new pilot study. (LaMotte, 8/8)

CNN: Rate Of Stroke Deaths Among Middle-Age US Adults Hit Two-Decade High During Covid Pandemic, Report Shows
Middle-age people in the United States are more likely to die from a stroke than they have been in about two decades, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (McPhillips, 8/8)

CBS News: Researchers Find Link Between High Diastolic Blood Pressure And Migraines In Women
Some women with high blood pressure may be at higher risk of migraine. Migraine sufferers are at higher risk of strokes and heart attacks, but does having risk factors for cardiovascular disease increase the risk of developing migraines? In a new study, researchers in the Netherlands found that women with higher diastolic blood pressure, the lower number in a blood pressure reading, were 16% more likely to have migraines than women with normal diastolic blood pressure. (Marshall, 8/7)

NBC News: Women Who Spend Time On TikTok Feel Less Satisfied With Their Bodies, Study Suggests
Women who spend time on TikTok are at a greater risk of disliking their own bodies and feeling worse about their appearance — especially if they’ve been exposed to pro-anorexia content, a study published Wednesday suggests. Australian researchers surveyed 273 women ages 18 to 28 from July 2021 to October 2021 about their TikTok use. As part of the study, the participants were then shown what was referred to as “pro-anorexia,” also known as “pro-ana,” images. (Rosenblatt, 8/7)

Stat: Scientists Learning How Neighborhood Can Affect Biology Of Cancer
Where you live has a relationship to your odds of getting cancer and surviving cancer. Epidemiologists studying this link they see in the data have focused on so-called social determinants of health — poor access to transportation, for example, could make it harder for residents to see a doctor. Places lacking grocery stores with fresh food could mean worse nutrition for locals. (Chen, 8/8)