Los Angeles Times: A Year Since California Launched Hate-Crime Hotline, What's Happened
In the year since California launched a hotline for reporting hate crimes, most of the calls were related to race or ethnicity, with 26.8% of calls citing anti-Black bias. The second- and third-most cited incidents involved anti-Latino and anti-Asian bias, state officials announced Monday. The statewide hotline was created to address the uptick in hate crimes across California during the COVID-19 pandemic, by compiling a comprehensive database to track incidents and offer an alternative to police intervention. In the year since it debuted, the state has received 1,020 reports of hate crimes — including discrimination and harassment claims. Most claims were reported from residences, like at homes or apartment complexes, and at the workplace. (Sosa, 5/20)

Times of San Diego: Black, Jewish Incidents Lead List In First Year Of California's Hate Crime Hotline
California’s anti-hate hotline received 1,020 reports of potential criminal acts in its first year of operation, with anti-Black and anti-Jewish incidents leading the list, officials said Monday. The  CA vs Hate hotline is a multilingual statewide phone and online portal that provides an anonymous reporting option for victims and witnesses of hate acts. (Jennewein, 5/20)

Los Angeles Times: Deaths Of Despair Are Soaring For Americans Of Color
Nakeya Fields has seen how the stresses that come with being Black — racial injustice, financial strain, social isolation — can leave people feeling hopeless and push some into substance abuse. It’s one of the reasons the Pasadena social worker started offering “therapeutic play” gatherings for Black mothers like herself and children. (Beason, 5/21)

Stat: Study Finds Gene Variants Tied To Breast Cancer Risk In Black Women
Hundreds of genetic variants can nudge someone’s risk of breast cancer up or down or towards a particular subtype. The studies identifying those gene variants, though, have largely involved people with European ancestry and thus give a less accurate picture of breast cancer risk for people who are not white. (Chen, 5/21)

Capital & Main: Money Has Run Out For Fruits And Vegetables For Low-Income Californians. Elected Leaders Are Silent.
More than 50 people stood dressed in jackets and hats against the heavy spring wind outside the Mother’s Nutritional Center grocery store in El Monte on the morning of April 12. People started lining up an hour before the store’s 9 a.m. opening time, and so many showed up that when the doors opened, only five customers at a time were allowed in. Every morning that week was the same: A crowd gathered outside the store before it opened. The low-income residents who had qualified for public food assistance were able to get rebates on fruits and vegetables, which could be used to buy more food. (Sánchez-Tello, 5/20)

Los Angeles Times: Feds Collected DNA From 1.5 Million Migrants, Report Finds
Routine collection of immigrants’ DNA by federal authorities has ballooned since 2020, with a 50-fold spike in the number of samples held in a national database of the sensitive genetic information, according to a report released Tuesday. In nearly four years, the DNA database — which is shared with law enforcement agencies nationwide — added more than 1.5 million noncitizen profiles, according to the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology. That compares with about 30,000 total samples obtained since 2005, when Congress authorized DNA collection by federal immigration authorities, the study found. (Castillo, 5/21)

CalMatters: Potential Tough-On-Crime Ballot Measure Promises Less Homelessness. Experts Aren’t Convinced 
Homelessness gets top billing in a measure likely to make it onto your November ballot. Whether the measure has anything to do with homelessness is debatable. (Kendall and Yu, 5/20)

San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. Falls Far Short Of Its Goal To Cut Youth Homelessness In Half
Five years after Mayor London Breed launched a $50 million initiative to cut San Francisco’s youth homeless population by half, the city remains far from reaching its bold goal. The initiative, called Rising Up, brought together city officials, philanthropists and nonprofit groups in hopes of sharply reducing homelessness among young adults from 1,243 to about 622 within five years. They planned to reach that target, in part, by providing housing subsidies to more than 400 people ages 18-24 by 2024. The city covered about half of the program costs, while the rest came from individual donors and corporate and nonprofit contributors, including Airbnb, Tipping Point and Crankstart Foundation. (Angst, 5/21)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Still No Vote Scheduled For The Mayor's Plan To Turn An Empty Warehouse Into A Large Homeless Shelter 
An effort to convert an empty warehouse near the airport into a massive homeless shelter remains largely on hold as some San Diego leaders express hesitation about both the real estate deal and the city’s overall finances. (Nelson, 5/20)

Los Angeles Blade: A New Study Doesn't Show Trans Surgery "Increases Suicide"
This weekend, multiple accounts and news stories were posted in far-right outlets claiming that a new study showed that “transgender surgeries dramatically increase the risk of suicide.” The claim, based on a study published in a pseudoscience journal, as determined by Media Bias/Fact Check, was then amplified by leading anti-trans accounts on the Twitter platform, including Elon Musk himself. Upon further review, the article appears to have made critical errors that were quickly caught by expert researchers in the science of transgender care, including an egregious error in which the wrong control group was selected for the study. (Reed, 5/20)

Los Angeles Times: How To Find Help For A Drug Or Mental Health Crisis
Fatal overdoses in the U.S. fell for the first time in five years in 2023, according to preliminary estimates recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but UCLA researcher Joseph Friedman warns that the new findings should not be interpreted to mean that the nation’s drug and mental health crises are abating. (Beason, 5/21)

The Hill: White House Lauds PACT Act As It Hits 1 Million Toxin Claims Granted To Vets 
The White House on Tuesday announced that more than 1 million claims have been granted through the PACT Act, a landmark law passed in 2022 that gave veterans expanded access to apply for compensation and relief related to toxic exposures during service. More than 880,000 veterans are receiving disability benefits through the PACT Act across the entire country and its territories, according to the White House. (Dress, 5/21)

San Francisco Chronicle: More Male Candidates Are Talking About Abortion Rights Than Ever
The 2024 election will be the first presidential contest waged since the fall of Roe v. Wade, and it means abortion access is suddenly being championed on a major scale by the group that still makes up a majority of lawmakers in America: men. The Democratic Party as a whole has long supported abortion rights. But since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning the constitutional right to obtain an abortion, Democratic men — including President Joe Biden, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and governors of several states — have made access to abortion one of their top issues on the campaign trail. While they are messaging access to abortion in different ways, it marks the first time the most powerful men in the country are consistently and prominently discussing the issue. (Stein, 5/21)

Los Angeles Times: Pregnant? Researchers Want You To Know About Fluoride
Adding fluoride to drinking water is widely considered a triumph of public health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the cavity-prevention strategy ranks alongside the development of vaccines and the recognition of tobacco’s dangers as signal achievements of the 20th century. But new evidence from Los Angeles mothers and their preschool-age children suggests community water fluoridation may have a downside. (Kaplan, 5/20)

CIDRAP: Long-COVID Codes In Health Record May Dramatically Underestimate Its Prevalence 
Long COVID is likely much more prevalent than indicated in electronic health record (EHR) diagnostic or referral codes, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researchers report in eClinicalMedicine. (Van Beusekom, 5/20)

CIDRAP: DR Congo Mpox Outbreak Poses Global Threat Of Deadlier Clade
An ongoing outbreak of the clade 1 mpox virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) poses a threat to the United States, authors write in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Clade 1 is more deadly and severe than the clade 2 virus that caused a global outbreak among men who have sex with men (MSM) in 2022. (Soucheray, 5/20)

CIDRAP: CDC Urges Travelers To Saudi Arabia To Be Current With Meningococcal Vaccines 
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today issued a health alert and a level 1 travel alert about meningococcal disease in travelers to Saudi Arabia, especially those taking part in pilgrimage activities. The alerts follow a recent notification from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Of 12 recent cases in the United States and Europe due to Saudi Arabia travel, 10 were in people who traveled to Saudi Arabia and 2 were close contacts, the CDC said in its Health Advisory Network notice. (Schnirring, 5/20)

Stat: H5N1 Virus Can Be Tracked In Retail Milk, Scientists Say
Scientists from the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have managed to generate a full genetic sequence of H5N1 virus from milk, a development they suggest means commercially purchased milk products could be used to monitor the progress of the bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle and to check for important changes in the virus over time. (Branswell, 5/21)

The New York Times: Farm Animals Are Hauled All Over The Country. So Are Their Pathogens. 
The bird flu virus that is spreading through American dairy cows can probably be traced back to a single spillover event. Late last year, scientists believe, the virus jumped from wild birds into cattle in the Texas panhandle. By this spring, the virus, known as H5N1, had traveled hundreds of miles or more, appearing on farms in Idaho, North Carolina and Michigan. The virus did not traverse those distances on its own. Instead, it hitched a ride with its hosts, the cows, moving into new states as cattle were transported from the outbreak’s epicenter to farms across the country. (Anthes and Qiu, 5/20)

The New York Times: The Disease Detectives Trying To Keep The World Safe From Bird Flu 
As Dr. Sreyleak Luch drove to work the morning of Feb. 8, through busy sunbaked streets in Cambodia’s Mekong river delta, she played the overnight voice messages from her team. The condition of a 9-year-old boy she had been caring for had deteriorated sharply, and he had been intubated, one doctor reported. What, she wondered, could make the child so sick, so fast? “And then I just thought: H5N1,” she recalled. “It could be bird flu.” (Nolen, 5/20)

The Atlantic: Pigs Would Be A Dangerous Bird-Flu Host
As unnerving as H5N1’s current spread in cows might be, “I would be a whole lot more concerned if this was an event in pigs,” Richard Webby, the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds, told me. Like cows, pigs share plenty of spaces with us. They also have a nasty track record with flu: Swine airways are evolutionary playgrounds where bird-loving flu viruses can convert—and have converted—into ones that prefer to infect us. (Wu, 5/20)

Times of San Diego: UCSD Researchers Granted $5.6 Million To Further Genome Study Program
UC San Diego researchers have been awarded a $5.6 million grant through the Coast-to-Coast Consortium to further efforts with the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, it was announced Monday. The program collects a wide range of biosamples, survey responses, physical measurements, electronic health records and data from wearable devices to create a larger genomic database, giving biomedical researchers a greater pool of knowledge to draw from. (Sklar, 5/20)

Bloomberg: US Invests $50 Million To Help Prevent Cyberattacks On Private Hospitals
The US government is seeking to play a more active role in protecting the private health-care sector from a deluge of cyberattacks that have disrupted patient care and left providers unpaid. US health officials will unveil Monday a new program to create tools that defend internet-connected hospital equipment from cyberattacks that could take them offline or leave them incapacitated. (Griffin, 5/20)

Becker's Hospital Review: 62% Of Americans Favor ACA Despite Trump Criticism
The majority of Americans are in favor of the Affordable Care Act despite disagreement over the healthcare reform law by the presidential contenders in the 2024 Biden-Trump rematch. As of April, 62% of Americans held a favorable opinion of the ACA, while 37% viewed it unfavorably, according to a survey by KFF. Support for the law has increased slightly over the past six months; in February, 59% of respondents approved of the ACA, while 39% disapproved. (Gamble, 5/20)

CIDRAP: Data Show Rising Antibiotic Resistance With Repeat Urinary Tract Infections 
Over half (57%) of index urinary tract infections (UTIs) treated at a California healthcare system were caused by bacteria resistant to at least one antibiotic class, while 13% were resistant to three or more classes, with respective proportions rising to 65% and 20% with subsequent infections. (Van Beusekom, 5/20)

Bloomberg: Hims & Hers Debuts $199 Weight-Loss Shots, Undercutting Wegovy, Ozempic
In just a few years, Hims & Hers Health Inc. reached almost $1 billion in sales by making it easy to buy cheap, generic versions of popular drugs such as Viagra. Now it’s using that playbook to jump into the hottest part of health-care: weight-loss shots. And in typical fashion, a big part of the company’s pitch is the discount. Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk A/S, costs roughly $1,350 for a month of injections without insurance, and Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound is similarly priced. Hims said it’s offering a treatment with the same active ingredient as Wegovy for $199 a month. That undercuts big pharma by as much as 85%. (Muller and Nix, 5/20)