San Francisco Chronicle: Exclusive: S.F. Cuts Days That Homeless Families Can Stay In Shelters
San Francisco will set new limits next month on how long homeless families can stay in city shelters and restrict who is eligible, the Chronicle has learned, a move that critics said would push families back onto the street. The San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing ... said the changes, which will take effect Dec. 10, are an effort to improve a system that doesn’t prioritize families with the most critical needs, but homeless advocates warn the new rules will be catastrophic for families facing homelessness. (Toldeo, 11/26)

Los Angeles Times: L.A. County Supervisors Vote To Study Homeless Services Overhaul
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors gave qualified approval Tuesday to a proposal to study the creation of a new county department to manage billions of dollars in homeless services funds. The 4-0 vote calls for the county chief executive to report in 60 days on creating the department that would consolidate the homeless-related programs of more than a dozen other departments and the hundreds of millions of dollars currently managed by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. (Smith, 11/26)

Voice of OC: Orange County Confronts Homelessness Ahead Of Thanksgiving
Officials in Stanton, one of OC’s smallest cities with just 38,000 residents, declared homelessness a local emergency two days before Thanksgiving and joined cities across the county cracking down on encampments. On Tuesday, city council members voted unanimously on a resolution declaring an emergency over the homelessness crisis – an issue that city officials say they spent over $15 million on since 2017 but have still seen a sharp increase of people living on the street. (Elattar, 11/27)

CalMatters: Busing People Out Of Homelessness: How California’s Relocation Programs Really Work 
Mayor London Breed, outgoing mayor of San Francisco, made waves recently with a major policy shift: Before providing a shelter bed or any other services, city workers must first offer every homeless person they encounter a bus or train ticket to somewhere else. (Kendall, 11/26)

KQED: Santa Clara Valley Water District Cracks Down On Unhoused People Near Waterways
The Santa Clara Valley Water District passed an encampment ban on Tuesday, making it tougher for unhoused people to live near most rivers, creeks and streams in the South Bay. “We can’t allow our unhoused neighbors and our housed neighbors to face flood risks,” said Rick Callender, the district’s chief executive officer. “This has truly been a troubling path for staff to recommend such an ordinance, but it is a necessary path.” Callender said the agency will prioritize an education-first approach, stating he wants to avoid “more people of color incarcerated.” (Romero, 11/26)

Los Angeles Times: Seniors Over The Medi-Cal Income Limit Struggle To Afford Payments
Month by month, the savings that Rosaline George scraped together in her years as a journalist and local government employee have been dwindling as the 97-year-old pays out of pocket for hourly care. “Without a caregiver,” she said, “I would be dead in two days.” Getting onto Medi-Cal, the California Medicaid program, could be her gateway to a program that pays for home caregivers. But George learned that to do so, she would have to spend most of her Social Security check on medical expenses, leaving her just $600 a month to survive in her Hollywood apartment. (Alpert Reyes, 11/27)

CalMatters: The Price Tag On Project 2025’s Abortion Plan: $300 Million Cut To Medi-Cal 
If President-elect Donald Trump goes forward with Project 2025, California could lose out on at least $300 million a year in funding for abortions, family planning and contraception for millions of low-income residents. (Madan, 11/26)

VC Star: $1.5 Million Scholarship Program To Tackle Behavioral Health Worker Shortage
A public Medi-Cal insurance plan has launched a $1.5 million scholarship program for students pursuing educational training that leads to behavioral health careers. (Kisken, 11/26)

KVPR: SEIU Won Big On Election Night. Will Fresno County IHSS Workers Finally Get A Raise?
Service Employees International Union Local 2015 scored some of the biggest wins in Fresno County elections this November, but now comes the hard part: making their political victories pay off for workers – literally. The union’s fight to preserve health care benefits and secure raises for the county’s roughly 25,000 In-Home Supportive Services (or IHSS) workers will hit the two-year mark in December. (Morano, Fresnoland, 11/26)

Becker's Hospital Review: Google Digs Deeper Into Healthcare AI: 5 Notes
[Mountain View-based] Google has launched Health AI Developer Foundations, a suite of open-weight AI models designed to simplify and accelerate the development of healthcare applications, particularly in medical imaging. "AI has the potential to transform healthcare by improving diagnostic accuracy, expanding access to care, and reducing administrative burdens," said Google in its announcement. "With HAI-DEF, we aim to lower the barriers to entry for health AI development and empower a diverse set of contributors to innovate." (Dyrda, 11/26)

Axios: HHS Enforcement Of Health Data Privacy Is Lacking: Report
The Health and Human Services Department is meeting a requirement for auditing health care organizations' data privacy standards but could be doing more to safeguard patient data, a federal watchdog found. Cyberattacks affecting health care providers and vendors have become more common in recent years, often exposing individuals' private health information. (Goldman, 11/26)

The Washington Post: U.S. Okays Organ Transplants Between People With HIV, Expanding Donor Pool
People with HIV will be able to receive kidney or liver transplants from donors who also have HIV, federal health officials announced Tuesday. Until now, such transplants were only allowed as part of research studies. Otherwise, people with HIV could not donate their kidneys or livers. The landmark move, which takes effect Wednesday, is expected to shorten wait times for organs for all patients and reduce hurdles to lifesaving care for those with HIV. It’s also a testament to medical progress in treating HIV and bolsters efforts to lessen stigma around the disease, experts say. (Kaur, 11/27)

ScienceAlert and AFP: HIV Cases Reach Lowest Point Since Rise Of Disease In 1980s
Fewer people contracted HIV last year than at any point since the rise of the disease in the late 1980s, the United Nations said Tuesday, warning that this decline was still far too slow. Around 1.3 million people contracted the disease in 2023, according to the new report from the UNAIDS agency. Around 630,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses last year, the lowest level since a peak of 2.1 million in 2004, the report said ahead of World AIDS Day on Sunday. (Lawler and Dury, 11/27)

Becker's Hospital Review: Healthcare Leaders Urge Congress To Recognize Pharmacists As Providers
In a Nov. 25 letter sent to congressional leaders, the Healthcare Leadership Council pressed legislators to restore pandemic-era pharmacist scopes of practice. The Healthcare Leadership Council is advocating for leaders in the Senate and House to enact several legislative items before the end of 2024, according to a news release shared with Becker's. One of these pertains to pharmacist-provided services. (Twenter, 11/26)

The New York Times: New Obesity Drug MariTide Helps Patients Lose Up To 20% Of Weight, Early Data Shows 
The pharmaceutical manufacturer Amgen announced on Tuesday that an experimental obesity drug helped patients lose up to 20 percent of their weight in a year. The drug, MariTide, is given by injection once a month, compared with once a week for other obesity drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound that are already on the market. Those drugs have stunned longtime obesity researchers, who had all but given up on ever seeing safe and effective weight loss drugs. Now, dozens of similar drugs are in development, as companies try to improve on the current ones. Amgen’s is among the first to show what might be possible. (Kolata, 11/26)

MedPage Today: U.K. Data Tie Acetaminophen To Increased Ulcer Risk
Widespread belief holds that the popular over-the-counter painkiller acetaminophen does not cause stomach ulcers, but a new study from Great Britain puts that in doubt. Acetaminophen use was also associated with increased rates of more general health problems including heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and hypertension, the group reported in Arthritis Care & Research. (Gever, 11/26)

Stat: BIOSECURE Act On Chinese Biotechs Is Harder To Pass Next Year 
Legislation targeting Chinese biotechnology companies caused a ruckus early this year. None of that may matter if Congress doesn’t pass it in December. The BIOSECURE Act would restrict U.S. pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies from doing business with certain Chinese companies, including WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics. The bill would increase costs for drugmakers. (Wilkerson, 11/27)

Stat: New Report Urges Guidelines For Stem Cell-Based Embryo Models
Policymakers and scientific groups need to specify guidelines for the burgeoning field that uses stem cells to mimic aspects of embryonic development, including by establishing certain red lines on research, an influential U.K. bioethics group said Wednesday in a new report. (Joseph, 11/26)

Bay Area News Group: Trump Chooses Stanford's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya To Lead NIH
President elect Donald J. Trump announced on Tuesday night that he would nominate Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of health policy and outspoken critic of the nation’s public health system, to lead the National Institutes of Health. (Krieger, 11/27)

Newsweek: What Jay Bhattacharya, Trump's NIH Pick, Has Said About Anthony Fauci 
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, remains a vocal critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bhattacharya has accused Fauci and other leaders of suppressing scientific research and debate during the pandemic. "The rot, having accumulated over decades, was plain for all to see," he wrote in an opinion piece published on UnHerd, a British news and opinion site, earlier in November. (Rahman, 11/27)

Politico: Trump Picks Jim O’Neill For No. 2 Spot At HHS 
President-elect Donald Trump tapped Jim O’Neill, a close associate of early Trump backer Peter Thiel, for HHS deputy secretary. The rise of the former CEO of the Thiel Foundation comes years after O’Neill was in the mix to be Trump’s first FDA commissioner in his first term. O’Neill has ties across Silicon Valley and previously served as HHS principal associate deputy secretary during the George W. Bush administration. (Lim, 11/26)

The Washington Post: Trump’s Cabinet: Loyalists, Competing Ideologies And Government Skeptics
Donald Trump entered the White House eight years ago with a Cabinet full of traditional conservative credentials, tapping some people he barely knew to help him learn his way around Washington. Now the president-elect has rapidly assembled a different kind of team for his second term — enlisting people deeply critical of the agencies they will lead, bucking conservative orthodoxy with some of his picks and, above all, rewarding his most loyal allies. (Knowles, LeVine and Zakrzewski, 11/26)

The New York Times: On Big Pharma, Food and Agriculture, These Are Kennedy’s Unexpected Bedfellows
When it comes to tearing down corporate capture among the giants — Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food, among others — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideas echo those of some of the incoming Trump administration’s loudest critics. (Baumgaertner, 11/27)

Bloomberg: Vaccine Head Sees Scope For Support Despite Trump’s RFK Jr. Pick
Donald Trump’s administration will likely support global immunization efforts, even though his proposed secretary of health and human services has voiced skepticism about such initiatives, according to the head of an organization that helps to vaccinate more than half of the world’s children. Sania Nishtar, chief executive officer of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, said she’s hopeful that the bipartisan support the group received during Trump’s previous term as US president will carry through to his next four years. (Furlong and Lacqua, 11/26)

Politico: US Membership In The World Health Organization Is On The Line With Trump’s Return 
The United States’ future in the World Health Organization is again in flux with President-elect Donald Trump returning to the White House. If the U.S. withdraws from the global health body, as Trump attempted to do in his first term, the WHO could lose its top government donor and hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions. In exchange, America could lose access to the global network that sets the flu vaccine’s composition every year, and U.S. drugmakers could lose the WHO’s help in selling their products, current and former U.S. government officials say. (Paun, 11/26)

Los Angeles Times: L.A. County Gears Up For Trump With Millions For Immigrants, Trangender Residents
Gearing up for another Trump presidency, Los Angeles County supervisors will funnel millions in funding to beef up support for immigrants and transgender residents, who could be targeted by the incoming administration. The governing board of the deep-blue county passed a flurry of resistance-themed motions Tuesday in response to the incoming president’s anti-transgender rhetoric and his pledge to carry out mass deportations of immigrants in the country illegally. (Ellis and Alpert Reyes, 11/26)

The Wall Street Journal: Trump’s Fentanyl Pledge Threatens To Sour Bright Spot In China Relations 
Two weeks ago, counternarcotics officials from the U.S. and Mexico flew to Shanghai to meet with their Chinese counterparts. The gathering was a rare opportunity for officials from three countries on the front lines of the fentanyl crisis to swap intelligence on the flows of fentanyl and the drug money financing it. It was the sort of meeting of cops and prosecutors that U.S. officials have long been pushing for, but that until recently China had resisted.  (Spegele, 11/27)

The New York Times: Fentanyl Rises Again, This Time As Trump’s Diplomatic Weapon Against China 
Experts at the Council on Foreign Relations say that Chinese and U.S. law enforcement officials need to work together more closely, and that China needs to provide the United States with more support in anti-money laundering efforts to block the flow of illicit money funding the trade. Some analysts were concerned that tariffs might hurt that effort more than help it. “An imposition of tariffs is not going to do anything regarding the flow of fentanyl,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on global drug policy. (Pierson, 11/26)

Reuters: China State Media Warn Trump Against Mutually Destructive Tariff War 
China's state media warned U.S. President-elect Donald Trump his pledge to slap additional tariffs on Chinese goods over fentanyl flows could drag the world's top two economies into a mutually destructive tariff war. Editorials in Chinese communist party mouthpieces China Daily and the Global Times late on Tuesday warned the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to not make China a "scapegoat" for the U.S.' fentanyl crisis or "take China's goodwill for granted regarding anti-drug cooperation". (Cash, 11/27)

The Guardian: Is The China-US Fentanyl Pipeline Really Responsible For The US Opioid Crisis? 
Fentanyl started arriving in the US from China about 10 years ago. In 2020, the US Drug Enforcement Administration said that China was the “primary source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked through international mail”. As authorities in the US and China have cracked down on traffickers and criminal gangs, much of that flow has been re-routed through cartels in Mexico. Rather than sending shipments of finished illicit fentanyl directly to the US, drug traffickers and exporters in China send precursor chemicals to Mexico, where they can be turned into fentanyl and sent on to the US. (Hawkins, 11/26)

The Washington Post: Trump Tied Tariffs To Migrants And Fentanyl. Here Are The Facts. 
Donald Trump’s claim that illegal border crossings are out of control — which was among the reasons he cited for the tariffs he said Monday he plans to enact against Mexico, Canada and China — is contradicted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection data showing lower levels of crossings this fall than during the final months of Trump’s first term. Neither his claim that border crossings constitute an unchecked “invasion” nor his depiction of drugs pouring across an “open” and unguarded border has any basis in federal data. (McDaniel and Miroff, 11/26)

The Wall Street Journal: Why Mexico Will Find It Tough To Heed Trump’s Calls To Tame The Cartels 
President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to slap a 25% tariff on Mexico’s goods unless it stops fentanyl trafficking and illegal migration risks setting the trade partners on a collision course over an intractable challenge for both countries. Ahead of the new trade negotiations, Mexico’s greatest weakness has been its historic inability to confront the powerful drug gangs that control about a third of the country. Mexico has had success stopping immigration over the past year, but ending drug smuggling might be an impossible ask, in part because of strong demand in the U.S. (Cordoba and Bergengruen, 11/26)

Los Angeles Times: Residents Near Polluted Tijuana River Want More Urgent Action
Rain is coming in south San Diego, which means higher water levels in the polluted Tijuana River — and, potentially, even worse air quality. Now, residents worry that the home air filters newly provided by San Diego County won’t be enough to curb the noxious air from the rising river. (Deng, 11/27)

Los Angeles Times: Warnings Issued For Contaminated Raw Milk Sold In L.A. County
Public health officials announced Tuesday that raw milk contaminated with the bird flu virus may have been sold at stores in Los Angeles County. ... In a statement from the County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health, officials warned residents to avoid consuming Raw Farm LLC milk with a lot code of 20241109 and Best By date of 11/27/2024. (Rust, 11/26)

Los Angeles Times: Bat Is The Prime Suspect In Ultra-Rare Human Rabies Fatality In Central California
A Fresno County resident has died of rabies they probably contracted from being bitten by a bat, the first such human case in the county in more than 30 years. No information about the individual, including their name, age or gender was released due to patient confidentiality laws, Assistant Director Joe Prado of the county Public Health Department said during a Zoom media conference Tuesday. (Campa, 11/27)

CIDRAP: Sluggish Gas Exchange In The Lungs May Be Involved In Long-COVID Brain Fog 
Lower rates of gas exchange in the lungs may contribute to impaired cognitive function ("brain fog") tied to long COVID, according to a small study to be presented at next week's Radiological Society of North America's (RSNA's) annual meeting in Chicago. Pulmonary gas exchange is the movement of oxygen from the lungs to the bloodstream and carbon dioxide from the bloodstream to the lungs. (Van Beusekom, 11/26)

Los Angeles Times: Neuroscientists Discover A New Brain Circuit That Deflates Anxiety
Your heart is racing, your arms are tingling and your breathing is shallow. You’re having an anxiety attack. And you’re in a public place, to boot. A crowded restaurant, say, or at the office. Not a space where you can comfortably lay on the ground and do some deep breathing exercises to calm yourself. What if there were a pill that would instead induce that kind of calm breathing for you? That scenario might be possible after a new scientific breakthrough. (Vankin, 11/27)