Los Angeles Times: Did A New, Tough Law Boost The Percentage Of Vaccinated California Kindergartners?
Vaccinations of California’s kindergartners jumped this fall from the previous year, boosting the percentage of students with all required vaccinations to 96% from 93%. It was the highest vaccination rate among kindergartners since 2001, the California Department of Public Health said. (Karlamangla and Lin, 4/12)

San Francisco Chronicle: Vaccination Rates For California Kindergartners Continue To Rise
Nearly 96 percent of children were fully vaccinated when they started kindergarten in the fall, according to a report released by the California Department of Public Health. That’s up from 93 percent in the previous school year and 90 percent in 2014-15. (Allday, 4/12)

San Jose Mercury News: California’s Kindergarten Vaccination Rates Hit New High
“It is gratifying to see that in the course of just one school year, more children and the public at large are now more fully protected from preventable diseases,” said Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, who co-authored Senate Bill 277, which fueled one of Sacramento’s most vitriolic legislative debates in years. (Seipel, 4/12)

Sacramento Bee: California Vaccine Rates Increase After Legislature Toughens Rules For Children 
Senate Bill 277, signed in 2015, required children without medical exemptions to receive all their shots before enrolling in school and eliminated a provision that allowed parents to seek personal and religious belief exemptions. (Luna, 4/12)

KPCC: More SoCal Kindergartners Are Getting Vaccinated 
A 95 percent immunization rate is the approximate threshold necessary to prevent the transmission of measles, according to Public Health. It found that the number of counties reporting a rate lower than that for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine went from 31 in 2015-16 to 14 this school year. (Glickman, 4/12)

The San Diego Union-Tribune: How Long Is Wait For A VA Appointment? New Website Tells You 
To back claims of improvement, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on Wednesday launched a website that reports wait times at its clinics across the nation.The site, called Access to Care, also scores VA hospitals against other medical facilities in a region...At the Mission Valley clinic, it’ll take 17 days. But at the La Jolla hospital, the wait is only four. The wait-time data isn’t “real time,” but it is fairly timely. The posted wait is based on the monthly average in the prior month. (Steele, 4/12)

KPBS: Report: Health Insurance Does Not Fully Protect Against Financial Pain From Cancer 
Having insurance is no guarantee against the financial pain of cancer. A new report from the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network highlights the problem. It finds even people with health insurance face stiff out-of-pocket costs. (Goldberg, 4/12)

Stat: Virtual Reality Takes Doctors On A 'Fantastic Voyage' Inside Hearts
Stanford University offers doctors a “room” with a unique view — the inside of an infant’s beating heart, valves opening and closing, blood cells rushing past. (Well, it’s unique if you discount the campy 1966 sci-fi thriller, Fantastic Voyage.) The virtual reality project tackles what has always been a major challenge for medical trainees: how to visualize a heart in action in three dimensions. Through VR goggles, they can now travel inside the heart and explore congenital heart defects as if they have been shrunken to the size of a peanut. (Piller, 4/13)

San Francisco Business Times: How Maverick CEO Jeanmarie Guenot Wants To Track Down, Defeat Tough-To-Treat Cancers
There are a lot of “dirty” cancer targets — even if a drug reaches its destination and kills cancer cells, the side effects to nearby healthy tissue are so damaging that there’s little net gain for the patient. So one of the pinnacles of cancer drug development is how to cleanly get to those dirty targets, and Maverick Therapeutics Inc. thinks it has found a way. (Leuty, 4/12)

In other news —

The San Diego Union-Tribune: Neurocrine Shares Soar After Ingrezza Approval, More Hiring Planned 
Neurocrine Biosciences stock closed up nearly 25 percent Wednesday, after the San Diego biotech company announced the approval of Ingrezza, its movement disorder drug. Neurocrine closed at $51.80, up $10.32, or 24.88 percent for the day. The company had announced the approval after end of trading Tuesday. At Tuesday’s closing, Neurocrine’s market value also jumped, to $4.5 billion. (Fikes, 4/12)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Another Biotech Company Joins San Diego, Bringing $40 Million In New Money
Tapping into San Diego’s biotech talent pool, a Michigan-based developer of an experimental therapy for liver disease is moving its administrative headquarters here. Cirius Therapeutics of Kalamazoo also has hired three experienced biomedical executives in San Diego to lead the company in connection with the opening. (Fikes, 4/11)

Orange County Register: Chapman University Mumps Cases Increase To 12
Mumps cases at Chapman University have reached 12, public health officials said Wednesday. Jessica Good, a spokeswoman for the Orange County Health Care Agency, said there are six lab-confirmed cases and six probable cases. Last week, with the tally of cases at nine, Chapman held two vaccination clinics for students and staff to receive the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine. (Perkes, 4/12)

In other news from across the state —

Los Angeles Times: Laguna Beach Continues To Resist The Commercial Side Of Recreational Pot 
The Laguna Beach City Council on Tuesday continued its hard-line stance against marijuana-related businesses, whether for medical or recreational purposes. The council unanimously favored a proposed ordinance that would ban commercial cultivation, distribution and sales of recreational cannabis, which California legalized with passage of Proposition 64 last November. (Alderton, 4/12)

The San Diego Union-Tribune: National Group Sues Poway, L.A. School Districts Over Hot Dogs, Bacon, Sausages, Bologna 
Hot dogs, bacon, sausages, bologna and all other processed meats are in the crosshairs of two new lawsuits that target lunch menus for the Poway and Los Angeles unified school districts.The suits, filed Wednesday in Superior Court by the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, D.C., are the advocacy group’s planned first volley of litigation on this issue. They ask the court to bar the districts from serving meals with cured and otherwise modified sources of animal protein on grounds that such foods violate the California education code’s requirement that all school foods served to students be of the “highest quality” and “greatest nutritional value possible.” (Sisson, 4/12)

The Wall Street Journal: Trump Threatens To Withhold Payments To Insurers To Press Democrats On Health Bill
Nearly three weeks after Republican infighting sank an overhaul of the Affordable Care Act, President Donald Trump dug back into the battle on Wednesday, threatening to withhold payments to insurers to force Democrats to the negotiating table. In an interview in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump said he was still considering what to do about the payments approved by his Democratic predecessor, President Barack Obama, which some Republicans contend are unconstitutional. Their abrupt disappearance could trigger an insurance meltdown that causes the collapse of the 2010 health law, forcing lawmakers to return to a bruising debate over its future. (Bender, Radnofsky and Nicholas, 4/12)

USA Today: Freedom Caucus Leader Brat Predicts Health Care Passage Within Weeks
Rep. Dave Brat, one of the conservative Freedom Caucus leaders whose resistance helped undermine the Republican health care proposal last month, says White House and congressional negotiators are close to a compromise that he predicts will pass the House in the next three weeks. “Within a few weeks, I think D.C. is going to be a little bit shocked,” he said in an interview with Capital Download. “We’re going to get to yes.” (Page, 4/12)

In other national health care news —

The Wall Street Journal: Prescription-Drug Shortages Help Push Up Prices Of Similar Drugs
Prescription-drug supply shortages have hurt U.S. medical care in recent years. According to new research, they’ve also caused another side effect—drug-price increases. A shortage of the bladder-cancer drug BCG in 2014 and 2015 led to sharp price increases for a less effective alternative treatment, mitomycin, according to research published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine. (Loftus, 4/12)

Bloomberg: HHS’s Price Urges Doctors To Submit Ideas For Medicare Pay Models
Doctors should step up and recommend more payment alternatives to fee-for-service Medicare, the HHS secretary said April 11. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said innovative payment models could work better than fee-for-service Medicare and might stop doctors from leaving the profession at middle age because they feel “burned out.” (Yochelson, 4/12)

Stat: How A Low-Level Drug Dealer Caused Two Dozen Overdoses
Last May, a low-level drug dealer named Bruce Griggs was released from an Ohio prison. He had served a short sentence stemming from a possession conviction so routine that his former defense attorney would later have trouble recalling it. Just three months later, though, Griggs would travel 250 miles to Huntington, W.Va., where he would distribute opioids that, in a span of a few hours, triggered two dozen overdoses, overwhelming the city’s emergency response system and serving as a stark symbol of the nation’s opioid crisis. (Joseph, 4/12)

The Associated Press: Trans Fats Ban Linked With Fewer NY Heart Attacks & Strokes
Local bans on artery-clogging trans fats in restaurant foods led to fewer heart attacks and strokes in several New York counties, a new study suggests. The study hints at the potential for widespread health benefits from an upcoming nationwide ban, the authors and other experts say. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2015 gave the food industry until next year to eliminate artificial trans fats from American products. (Tanner, 4/12)