Bay Area News Group: Antioch Launches Mental Health Crisis Response Team Named After Angelo Quinto
Isabella Collins vividly remembers the cold late December day when her brother Angelo, overcome with anxiety and paranoia, spun into a mental health crisis, prompting her to call 911. But the responding officers were not intervention specialists and were ill-equipped to deal with a mental health emergency. Within minutes, the Antioch officers physically restrained Angelo Quinto and he soon went limp on the hardwood floor, his family said. Three days later the 30-year-old Navy veteran died in a hospital. (Prieve, 5/8)

The Bakersfield Californian: Kern Health Leaders Recognize Mental Health For May 
Observed every May, Kern County will host a series of mind-focused events this month, as a collective part of its Grounded in Health Initiative. Prior campaigns this year tackled other health-based topics, such as exercise, nutrition and sleep. (Donegan, 5/8)

San Francisco Chronicle: Giants Put Mental Health In Spotlight During Mustache May
Mustache May is back, the San Francisco Giants’ clubhouse is already full of resplendent facial hair, and it’s all for a good cause. Outfielders Mike Yastrzemski and Austin Slater are again teaming to help a mental-health-awareness charity. May is Mental Health Awareness month and the recipient is Heart and Armor, which works with veterans using research-based programs to treat PTSD, in particular, while also helping veterans find proper medical care, reintegrate to civilian life and deal with issues such as trauma, race and ethnicity. (Slusser, 5/8)

San Francisco Chronicle: California Debates Extending PTSD Coverage To More First Responders
A paramedic for about 30 years, Susan Farren knew all was not well with first responders: Eight of her colleagues had died by suicide. Others had grappled with substance abuse or gone through painful divorces. So, in 2018, Farren founded a nonprofit in Santa Rosa to train and support emergency personnel struggling with trauma and stress. Hundreds of firefighters, police officers, and other first responders have since availed themselves of the organization’s timely help. (Sciacca, 5/8)

NPR: Teens' Social Media Use Should Be Monitored By Parents, APA Says
For the first time, the American Psychological Association has issued recommendations for guiding teenager's use of social media. The advisory, released Tuesday, is aimed at teens, parents, teachers and policy makers. This comes at a time when teenagers are facing high rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness. And, as NPR has reported, there's mounting evidence that social media can exacerbate and even cause these problems. (Doucleff, 5/9)

NBC News: Teens Should Be Trained In Media Literacy And Limit Their Screen Time, Psychologists Say
“There is a lot of talk about social media these days, including some suggestions that do not fit with the science,” said APA chief science officer Mitch Prinstein, a co-chair of the advisory panel that developed the recommendations. “We are releasing this report now to offer a science-based and balanced perspective on this issue so all stakeholders can make decisions based on our expertise regarding benefits and potential risks associated with social media.” (Rosenblatt, 5/9)

Orange County Register: Had Pink Eye? It Could Have Been From New COVID-19 Strain.
For some pollen allergy sufferers, eye irritation at this time of year is nothing new — but with the newest strain of COVID-19 circulating, local doctors are suggesting that if you have pink eye and a fever, you should test for COVID. The World Health Organization announced on Friday that COVID is no longer a global emergency, but the pandemic itself isn’t over and COVID continues to evolve. (Greiss, 5/8)

Bay Area News Group: California Detects First Case Of COVID Infection In Wildlife
The COVID virus has been found in a deer in the Sierra Nevada, representing the first detection of the pathogen in California’s free-ranging wildlife. (Krieger, 5/8)

Axios: COVID Test Kits From Insurance End May 11 With Public Health Emergency
With the pandemic public health emergency ending Thursday, time is quickly running out for most people to get COVID-19 tests covered by insurance. The end of the federal government’s health emergency that began in March 2020 will shift who pays for the testing kits and some COVID-19 treatments. (Tyko, 5/8)

CIDRAP: Study: Immune Cells—Not Antibodies—Cause COVID Vaccine-Linked Myocarditis
The rare cases of myocarditis among recipients of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine—mostly in young men—are caused by a generalized immune-cell and inflammatory response rather than vaccine-triggered antibodies, suggests a small study published late last week in Science Immunology. (Van Beusekom, 5/8)

Modesto Bee: Workers Seek Unpaid Wages From Hospice In Stanislaus County
A lawsuit against Community Hospice of Modesto seeks alleged unpaid wages over a 19-month period for current and former employees. The class-action complaint was filed in early April in Stanislaus County Superior Court against a hospice organization that was recognized recently as one of the best places to work in the region. (Carlson, 5/8)

Southern California News Group: Ambulance Stolen While Firefighters Battled Fatal California Blaze
A 31-year-old Los Angeles man was arrested in Long Beach this week on suspicion of stealing a Fire Department ambulance, after crashing it into a telephone pole, while firefighters were extinguishing a blaze that killed two people and injured one in an abandoned commercial building, authorities said. (Percy, 5/8)

Reuters: Abortion Pill Case To Be Heard By Conservative, Anti-Abortion Panel 
A case brought by anti-abortion groups seeking to ban the abortion pill mifepristone nationwide will be heard next week by a panel of three deeply conservative judges hostile to abortion rights, a federal appeals court revealed on Monday. ... The administration will be appealing to Circuit Judges Jennifer Walker Elrod, who upheld a Texas law making it more difficult for abortion clinics to operate in the state; James Ho, who has called abortion a "moral tragedy"; and Cory Wilson, who supported abortion bans as a Mississippi state legislator. (Pierson and Thomsen, 5/8)

The Washington Post: Most Say Mifepristone Abortion Pill Should Stay On Market, Post-ABC Poll Finds 
Two-thirds of Americans say the abortion drug mifepristone, used in the majority of abortions in the United States, should remain on the market, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. The poll finds that 66 percent of U.S. adults say mifepristone should remain on the market, while 24 percent say it should be taken off the market. Just under half, 47 percent, say access to mifepristone should be kept as is; 12 percent say it should remain on the market but be more restricted than it is now. (Guskin, 5/9)

Axios: FDA's New Abortion Catch-22
Abortion rights advocates are trying to force the Food and Drug Administration to expand access to medication abortion — even if that winds up undercutting the agency's rulemaking discretion. The FDA's regulatory powers over drugs that terminate pregnancies are being challenged by both abortion rights and anti-abortion groups in a way that creates a "dangerous path" for the agency to make independent scientific decisions, legal experts say. (Gonzalez, 5/8)

ABC News: FDA Advisory Committees Meeting To Discuss Over-The-Counter Birth Control
Advisory committees of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are meeting Tuesday and Wednesday to review the first-ever application for an over-the-counter birth control pill. At a joint meeting, the Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee and the Obstetrics, Reproductive, and Urologic Drugs Advisory Committee will discuss whether pharmaceutical company Perrigo can make its oral contraceptive Opill, which currently requires a prescription, to be available on store shelves. (Kekatos, 5/9)

Los Angeles Daily News: An Army Of Obstacles Stands Between LA’s Homeless Students And The Classroom 
In the Los Angeles Unified School District the number of homeless students increased by 15.5% in the last academic year, from 11,172 to 12,902, according to a district spokesperson. (Harter, 5/8)

The Wall Street Journal: Eviction Bans Remain In California More Than 3 Years Into The Pandemic
A handful of California cities are still enforcing laws that protect tenants from eviction or rent increases, extending pandemic-era policies that most of the country wound down more than a year ago. The San Francisco board of supervisors voted in March to maintain a local eviction ban for unpaid rent until at least the summer. In Oakland and Berkeley, similar laws will also run into the summer months. The city of Los Angeles, meanwhile, extended a prohibition on evicting tenants for having unauthorized pets or occupants in their apartments. It also renewed a rent freeze on rent-controlled apartments until next year. (Parker, 5/8)

San Francisco Chronicle: Oakland To Offer Free Wi-Fi For Public Housing Residents
Oakland plans to provide free high-speed internet access for residents in public housing in an effort to close the digital divide, officials announced. The Oakland Housing Authority plans to supply 1,117 households in the city’s five largest public housing communities with free wireless internet access by 2024, city officials said in a statement Saturday. Community rooms and areas will also have free Wi-Fi. (Flores, 5/7)

Los Angeles Times: Fighting The ‘Isolation’ Of Homelessness, With The Companionship Of Volunteer Friends
During the half-hour phone call they bantered about the appearance of gray hair, the joys of getting their nails done and strategies to exercise more. Amid the small talk, Beth Thompson dropped a bombshell. After living 16 months in a tiny home village in North Hollywood, she’d soon be moving into her own apartment. Thompson and Tiffany Daniel have never met in person and likely never will. Daniel, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce, lives across the country in the town of Waldorf in southern Maryland. (Smith, 5/8)

Military Times: The Marine Corps Will Once Again Require Troops To Get Breathalyzed
Marine units must once again conduct random breathalyzer tests on assigned troops, following a years-long pause in the program because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because Marines must blow into the apparatus, the federal government’s COVID-19 emergency policies had “necessitated” a halt to the testing of on-duty Marines for alcohol via breathalyzer, according to a Marine administrative message. But with the public health emergency officially ending May 11, units are required to resume the testing by June, if they haven’t done so already. (Loewenson, 5/8)

San Francisco Chronicle: California Reparations: Why Not Every Black Resident Would Get Payment
California’s reparations task force has completed the central piece of its work, voting during the weekend to approve a plan to compensate some Black residents for the state’s role in enabling slavery and other forms of white supremacy. Yet even after the final vote, confusion remained over who exactly would qualify for potential cash payments. (Gardiner, 5/8)

Capitol Weekly: Missing Data: Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity 
It’s no secret that communicable diseases can have dramatically different impacts on different groups; elderly people, for example, saw the worst effects of COVID, with a death rate far beyond California’s average. Black Californians also had higher mortality rates from the disease. What of California’s LGBTQ community? The truth is, we don’t know. (5/8)

Reuters: Woman Who Sued Over Subway Tuna Seeks To Quit Case, Subway Demands Sanctions
The California woman suing Subway, claiming its tuna products contain ingredients other than tuna, wants to end her lawsuit because she is pregnant, prompting Subway to demand her lawyers be sanctioned for bringing a frivolous case. (Stempel, 5/8)

The Hill: Schumer To Convene Special Senate Democratic Caucus Meeting On Gun Violence 
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called for Senate Democrats to hold a special caucus meeting to discuss gun violence in the wake of multiple high-profile mass shootings over the past several weeks.  Schumer’s call to action comes after a gunman with an AR-15-style rifle killed eight people and wounded seven at a mall Saturday in Allen, Texas, and five other people, including an 8-year-old boy, were killed by a suspect armed with an AR-15 in Cleveland, Texas, April 29.  (Bolton, 5/8)

The Wall Street Journal: Mauricio Garcia, Gunman In Texas Mass Shooting, Was Terminated By Army For Mental-Health Issues 
The gunman authorities said was responsible for the deaths of eight in Allen, Texas, was terminated by the Army for mental-health reasons three months after he enlisted in 2008, and recent social-media postings officials are examining show links to white-supremacist views. (Kesling, Gurman and Flores, 5/8)

The New York Times: In Shift, Texas House Advances Bill To Raise Age To Buy Assault Weapons 
What had for years been a solid wall of opposition among Texas Republicans to gun control showed small signs of cracking on Monday as a bipartisan committee of the State Legislature voted to advance a bill raising the minimum age to purchase AR-15-style rifles. The preliminary vote was remarkable in a State Capitol dominated by Republicans, all the more so because it had been entirely unexpected: When the day began, the 13-member committee had not been scheduled to meet at all. (Goodman, 5/8)

AP: US Backs Study Of Safe Injection Sites, Overdose Prevention 
For the first time, the U.S. government will pay for a large study measuring whether overdoses can be prevented by so-called safe injection sites, places where people can use heroin and other illegal drugs and be revived if they take too much. The grant provides more than $5 million over four years to New York University and Brown University to study two sites in New York City and one opening next year in Providence, Rhode Island. (Johnson, 5/8)

The Washington Post: Overdose Prevention Centers Are Tough Sell In U.S. Despite Successes 
Addiction experts and others regard the facilities as ways to reach people who use drugs where they are — and keep them alive — despite questions about the sites’ legality under federal law. But even with the success of New York City’s OnPoint NYC, the only government-sanctioned program operating in this country, such facilities are proving a tough sell over concerns they encourage drug use, crime and neighborhood blight. (Ovalle, 5/8)

The Washington Post: TB Cases Rise, CDC Says, Spotlighting An Increase Among Young Children 
In 2022, 8,300 cases of tuberculosis were identified in the United States, marking a 5 percent increase from the year before, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 2022 rebound in TB cases included a 26 percent increase in TB diagnoses in children 4 or younger — from 160 cases in 2021 to 202 last year. That increase is concerning, CDC officials said in a news release, because cases in that age group are usually the result of recent transmission rather than reactivation of a long-standing latent infection. (Searing, 5/8)

CIDRAP: Adverse Events Highest After Intradermal Injection Of Jynneos Mpox Vaccine 
An Australian postmarketing study of adverse events following Jynneos mpox vaccination finds that local adverse event rates were highest following intradermal administration, but absolute event rates were lower than in previous studies, and the vaccine was well tolerated overall. The study was published late last week in JAMA. (Van Beusekom, 5/8)