LAist: During Strike, As In Pandemic, Students With Special Needs Get Sidelined 
San Fernando Valley sixth grader Marie will be home from school for much of this week, along with more than 422,000 other Los Angeles Unified students. District support staff members are striking to protest alleged harassment during contract negotiations over the last year. Teachers have also walked off the job in solidarity. ... The family is enduring an uncertain week. Marie has multiple diagnoses, including autism. LAist agreed not to publish the family’s last name and use their daughter’s middle name to protect their privacy. (Dale, 3/22)

Los Angeles Times: California Bill Would Require High Schools To Hand Out Free Condoms
A high school student went to a pharmacy to purchase condoms but was turned away because of his age. A student wanting to buy condoms to prevent sexually transmitted diseases was shamed at the store. Another student couldn’t afford the contraceptives and became pregnant. Teenagers shared these stories with Ria Barbaria and Fiona Lu, California high school students who are co-policy directors for GENup, a youth-led social justice organization. (Arredondo, 3/22)

San Diego Union-Tribune: San Diego County Has Seen 20 Cases Of Fungal Threat That CDC Calls A Growing Concern 
So far this year, San Diego County has already recorded 20 cases of candida auris, the drug-resistant yeast that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned this week is spreading “at an alarming rate in U.S. healthcare facilities.” (Sisson, 3/22)

Sacramento Bee: Deadly Fungus Spread In California, US Hospitals During COVID
A deadly fungus spread rapidly in hospitals throughout the United States during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday. The fungus, called Candida auris, maintained a hold on California in the last year. Candida auris is considered an urgent antimicrobial resistance threat, the agency stated, because it has shown resistance to several antifungal drugs, spreads quickly and can cause severe infection with high death rates. (Truong, 3/22)

San Francisco Chronicle: How Organ Donation In California Is About To Change
The federal government is set to overhaul the country’s organ transplant system, a move that is likely to have a substantial impact on California, the state with some of the worst statistics. The United Network for Organ Sharing, a quasi-governmental nonprofit organization that manages the country’s organ transplants, has held the government contract to run the federal Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network since its creation almost 40 years ago. Lawmakers and advocates have complained about the system for years, and both Democratic and Republican administrations have tried to fix it. (Stein, 3/22)

Sacramento Business Journal: Rancho Cordova Biotech Company ThermoGenesis Raises $3 Million With Private Placement Of Stock
ThermoGenesis Holdings Inc. has raised $3 million in a private placement, after seeing its loss grow in the third quarter. The Rancho Cordova biotechnology company announced closing on the private placement of its stock on Monday. According to the announcement, it plans to use the proceeds as working capital and for general corporate purposes. Company representatives did not respond to a request for specifics. (Hamann, 3/22)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Activists Allege 'Patient Dumping' Of Homeless People At San Diego Hospitals, Seek Legislative Hearing 
Advocates for homeless people in San Diego are asking legislators to investigate why “patient-dumping” still happens at area hospitals years after a state law was enacted to stop the practice. (Warth, 3/22)

San Francisco Chronicle: Tiny Homes Could Count As Real Housing Under State Proposal
They finally have real beds, heat and doors that lock — so some residents of 33 Gough St. in San Francisco wonder why they can’t stay indefinitely in their new, tiny homes. City and state officials consider the 70 peaceful, pleasant little cabins to be emergency shelter and the people who live inside them still to be homeless. But a proposal would allow officials to shift that thinking — and consider the tiny homes actual housing and their residents housed. (Knight, 3/23)

Los Angeles Times: LASD Saw Signs Of Deadly Street Drug 4 Years Ago But Didn’t Alert The Public
It was at least four years ago that Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials say they began finding signs of a dangerous sedative infiltrating the local drug supply. At the time, the presence of xylazine — an animal tranquilizer — was not well-known to the public, though it has since become increasingly common, especially on the East Coast. The powerful sedative, also known as “tranq,” has been linked to deaths across the country and can cause human tissue to rot, leaving users with grisly wounds that sometimes lead to amputations. (Blakinger and Goldberg, 3/22)

CNN: What Makes Fentanyl So Deadly And How Can People Prevent Overdoses?
The United States is facing a crisis of overdose deaths. In 2021, more than 106,000 Americans lost their lives to drug-involved overdoses — including more than 1,100 teens that year alone. Synthetic opioids, primarily involving the powerful drug fentanyl, are the main driver of overdose deaths, with nearly a 7.5-fold increase overall from 2015 to 2021, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overdoses and poisoning are the third leading cause of death in kids and adolescents age 19 and younger. (Hetter, 3/23)

AP: Doctors May Miss How Addiction Patients Cheat Drug Tests 
Doctors often use urine tests to make sure patients taking medication for opioid addiction are sticking with treatment. A new study suggests they may be missing some cheaters. Nearly 8% of these patients sometimes spike their urine by adding their treatment medicine, buprenorphine, to the samples. Such spiking may go unnoticed by doctors who use rapid tests instead of more sophisticated lab tests that can reveal who’s cheating. (Johnson, 3/22)

The Washington Post: Homeland Security Launches “Operation Blue Lotus” To Target Fentanyl 
The Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday it has intensified efforts to stop fentanyl trafficking across the country’s southern border, launching “Operation Blue Lotus” with hundreds of U.S. agents and officers. The campaign will use new scanning technology, more drug-sniffing dogs and other detection tools to ramp up interdiction efforts and build criminal cases, officials said. Much of the effort will focus on ports of entry, the land border crossings where more than 90 percent of U.S. fentanyl seizures along the southern border have occurred since the start of the 2023 fiscal year on Oct. 1. (Miroff, 3/21)

Los Angeles Times: State Launches Probe Of Cannabis Licensing To 'Clean House' Of Corruption
Corruption in California’s cannabis industry has become widespread and brazen. There have been pay-to-play schemes, including a demand for cash in a brown paper bag for a pot license, threats of violence against local officials, and city council members accepting money from cannabis businesses even as they regulated them. (Elmahrek, 3/23)

Bay Area Reporter: Agency Opens First Trans Services Center In SF 
Caught in Tuesday's early morning rainstorm without an umbrella on route to attend the official opening of the first stand-alone facility dedicated exclusively to serving San Francisco's transgender and gender-nonconforming communities, Gizelle Mattingly slipped into the room holding the wardrobe offerings of the SheBoutique. Filled with free clothing that trans women and others can use for job interviews or other needs, Mattingly picked out a soft-pink blazer to borrow. A client and volunteer with the San Francisco Community Health Center's Trans Thrive program, Mattingly wanted to be presentable for the grand opening ceremony for the program's new dedicated space since she expected to be interviewed by the invited media. The experience was "inspirational," she told the Bay Area Reporter. (Bajko, 3/22)

Stat: Bancel, Sanders Spar Over What Moderna Owes The Government
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and Senate health committee Chair Bernie Sanders shook hands amicably before Wednesday’s hearing examining the company’s vaccine pricing strategy began. That’s about where the goodwill ended between the two. (Cohrs, 3/22)