AP: With 1 Out Of 3 Californians On Medicaid, Doctors Push Ballot Measure To Force State To Pay More 
California Gov. Gavin Newsom last year agreed to a tax increase that aimed to do two things: Help balance a budget with a multibillion-dollar shortfall, and pay doctors more money to treat patients covered by Medicaid — the taxpayer-funded health insurance program for people with low incomes that now covers one out of every three people in the state. A year later, California is relying on this tax more than ever. Newsom raised it again in March to help cover another multibillion-dollar shortfall this year. And he’s proposing to raise it a third time to generate even more money as the deficit has continued to grow. (Beam, 6/12)

San Francisco Chronicle: California Voters May Decide Whether To Roll Back Prop 47
Californians may have the chance to roll back parts of a law they approved in 2014 that downgraded drug possession and thefts worth less than $950 to misdemeanors, after a measure to reimpose felony punishments for those offenses qualified Tuesday for the November ballot. (Bollag, 6/11)

San Francisco Chronicle: Silicon Valley Life Science Firm Agilent Lays Off 184 Workers
Laboratory device manufacturer Agilent is laying off 184 workers across California, according to a state filing. The company will cut 156 jobs at its Santa Clara headquarters, plus 17 in San Diego, four in Folsom (Sacramento County) and seven in Carpinteria (Santa Barbara County).Layoffs are effective Aug. 9 and affect salespeople, finance workers, human resources staff, lawyers, manufacturing engineers and others. (Li, 6/11)

Reuters: Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Seeks To Overturn Fraud Conviction
Lawyers for Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and company President Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani on Tuesday urged a federal appeals court to overturn their convictions for defrauding investors in the failed blood testing startup, which was once valued at $9 billion. Amy Saharia, Holmes' lawyer, told a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that Holmes believed she was telling the truth when she told investors that Theranos' miniature blood testing device could accurately run a broad array of medical diagnostic tests on a small amount of blood. (Pierson, 6/11)

LAist: Los Angeles Moves To End COVID-19 Vaccine Requirement For Workers
Los Angeles has joined other cities like Long Beach and Pasadena in ending a COVID-19 vaccination requirement for city employees. Under the ordinance adopted by the city council on Tuesday, city workers who resigned or were terminated because of the COVID-19 vaccination policy can re-apply for their previous positions. However, the city’s usual hiring process will apply, and the employee’s previous work history including disciplinary action will be considered. There is no guarantee they will be rehired. (Farzan, 6/11)

San Francisco Chronicle: As COVID Cases Climb In California, A Look At Symptoms And Testing
COVID-19 markers in California have begun their expected summer uptick, driven by increased travel, indoor activities due to the heat and new coronavirus variants collectively known as FLiRT. These factors prompted a nearly 30% rise in COVID-19 related emergency room visits in California in the last week of May — the most recent reported time period — according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state’s test positivity rate has risen to 5.3% as of a week ago, up 1.4 percentage points from the previous week, according to the California Department of Public Health. A rate above 5% suggests the virus may be spreading. (Vaziri, 6/11)

Times of San Diego: Nearly 700 San Diegans Billed In Error Are Refunded COVID Relief Funds
San Diego is refunding the utility bills of 690 public utilities department customers who qualified for federal COVID relief funds but were billed instead, it was announced Tuesday. According to the city, the billing error was caused by a contractor working with the city’s department of information technology and was reported to public utilities on June 4. (Sklar, 6/11)

CIDRAP: New Definition Of Long COVID Aims To Offer Clarity, Direction 
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), in response to a request from the US federal government, has published a new consensus diagnosis for long COVID. While working groups, national governments, and health organizations have all offered definition of long COVID, no general consensus exists. The definition, which can be applied to both children and adults, reads: "Long COVID (LC) is an infection-associated chronic condition (IACC) that occurs after SARS-CoV-2 infection and is present for at least 3 months as a continuous, relapsing and remitting, or progressive disease state that affects one or more organ systems." (Soucheray, 6/11)

CIDRAP: Having Symptoms After Getting A COVID Vaccine May Indicate Robust Immune Response 
Headache, fatigue, malaise, and chills after COVID-19 vaccination are signs the immune system is marshalling a strong response against future infection, suggests a study posted today in the Annals of Internal Medicine. "Generally, we found that the higher the number of side effects, the higher the level of antibodies," first author Ethan Dutcher, MD, PhD, said in a UCSF news release. (Van Beusekom, 6/11)

CIDRAP: USDA Reports More H5N1 Detections In Mice And Cats 
In its latest updates, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) reported 36 more H5N1 avian flu detections in house mice, all in the same New Mexico county, as well as four more virus detections in domestic cats. Also today, APHIS reported four more H5N1 detections in domestic cats, including one from Oklahoma, which hasn't recently reported the virus in poultry or in dairy cows. (Schnirring, 6/11)

CNN: Bird Flu Is Rampant In Animals. Humans Ignore It At Our Own Peril
Mark Naniot remembers 2022 as the summer from hell. As the co-founder of Wild Instincts animal rescue in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, Naniot and his team spent the season sweating in gloves, gowns, smocks and masks and going through what felt like endless rounds of disinfection as they moved between the cages of the sick and injured animals they cared for. (Goodman, 6/11)

North Carolina Health News: New CDC Head Uses COVID-Era Innovations To Tackle Bird Flu Outbreak
Mandy Cohen, who led North Carolina’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is facing her first major test as director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — rising concerns about the spread of avian influenza. (Baxley, 6/12)

San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. Declares Itself Sanctuary City For Transgender, Nonbinary People
San Francisco leaders declared the city a sanctuary for transgender people Tuesday, becoming one of the first in the nation to do so amid a push by some conservative states to limit trans rights. (Toledo, 6/11)

Fox News: Gender Dysphoria And Eating Disorders Have Skyrocketed Since Pandemic, Report Reveals
Mental health diagnoses in children have skyrocketed since the COVID pandemic — led by gender dysphoria and eating disorders, according to a new report. LexisNexis Risk Solutions analyzed medical claims data submitted between 2019 and 2023 for patients under age 18. Overall, mental health claims rose 83% among young people in that time frame. (Rudy, 6/11)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Gloria, Council Agree To $2.15 Billion Budget, With Last-Minute Deals On Homelessness, Flood Aid And More
New money for homelessness programs, pothole repairs, small business aid and flood victims are key elements of a last-minute budget compromise San Diego City Council members unanimously approved Tuesday. (Garrick, 6/11)

The Mercury News: San Jose Approves $5.3 Billion Budget, Diverts More Than $23 Million From Affordable Housing To Homelessness Solutions
As the San Jose City Council approved the 2024-25 $5.3 billion budget on Tuesday evening, it shifted more than $23 million that was previously allocated to build permanent affordable housing to a tranche to support the city’s unhoused population and fund shelter construction and operations. The battle over how to use Measure E dollars — a real estate transfer tax for properties over $2 million — reared its head once again in this year’s budget process. The tax, which was passed by voters in 2020 and is expected to generate $50 million in the next year, originally had set spending priorities that dedicated a majority of the money for permanent affordable housing. (Hase, 6/11)

Bay Area News Group: Too Much Affordable Housing? Concord Rejects Low-Income Project Downtown, Draws State Scrutiny
At a public hearing last month, a real estate developer approached the Concord City Council with a proposal that, to many, might have seemed too good to turn down: 183 new downtown apartments, nearly all affordable, at no cost to the city. (Varian, 6/11)

Los Angeles Times: Mayors Of Los Angeles And San Francisco Diverge On Homelessness, Crime
Karen Bass and London Breed each made history when they were elected, shattering glass ceilings in their respective cities as the first female mayor of Los Angeles and first Black woman to lead San Francisco. They share many other similarities as powerful Democrats leading California’s marquee cities: a promise to reduce homelessness; plans to mitigate an opioid overdose crisis; an electorate concerned about crime. (Wiley, Smith and Sosa, 6/11)

Los Angeles Times: The White House Wants To Remove Medical Debt From Credit Scores
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed a rule that would remove medical bills from credit reports, a ban that would prevent lenders from considering those debts when making decisions about whether to issue loans. The proposed rule change, announced Tuesday, would also increase privacy protections, help raise credit scores and prevent debt collectors from using the credit reporting system to coerce people to pay. (Chang, 6/11)

Stat: NIH Pilot For Diverse Cancer Trials Raised Costs, Didn't Work
Government researchers hoped to attract a more diverse group of patients for clinical research by paying for the travel expenses of cancer patients seeking to volunteer for trials. It didn’t work. (Wilkerson, 6/12)

Stat: Why Google, Microsoft Can't Fix Health Care's Cybersecurity Problem
Facing a worsening cybersecurity crisis in health care, the Biden administration has followed a familiar political playbook: Call the biggest names in technology and secure promises, and money, to fix the problem. (Ross and Ravindranath, 6/12)

San Francisco Chronicle: Shield States Have Few Virtual Docs For Thousands Of Abortion Seekers
Like any other virtual visit, doctors in a handful of states log onto their computers, call patients and prescribe medication. Except their patients live in other states — and in some ways, another world. The medical providers — fewer than two dozen of them, only two of whom live in California — prescribe medication abortions for people who live in states that restrict or ban it. Telehealth abortions — in which abortion pills are sent by mail — have surged in the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. But the expanded availability of telehealth has obscured just how few providers are behind the climbing numbers. (Stein, 6/12)

The New York Times: Abortion Groups Say Tech Companies Suppress Posts And Accounts 
TikTok has briefly suspended the account of Hey Jane, a prominent telemedicine abortion service, four times without explanation. Instagram has suspended Mayday Health, a nonprofit that provides information about abortion pill access, without explanation as well. And the search engine Bing has erroneously flagged the website for Aid Access, a major seller of abortion pills online, as unsafe. The groups and women’s health advocates say these examples, all from recent months, show why they are increasingly confused and frustrated by how major technology platforms moderate posts about abortion services. (Schmall and Maheshwari, 6/11)

LAist: ‘Everything Went Wrong’: LA Family Called County Clinicians, Not Police, During A Mental Health Crisis. It Still Ended Tragically
When a Los Angeles police officer fatally shot a 40-year-old man in his parents’ Koreatown home last month, it was clear to many, including officers at the scene, that he was experiencing a mental health crisis. Earlier that day, Yong Yang’s mother had called the L.A. County Department of Mental Health to get help for her son, who had gone to the parents’ home because he was feeling paranoid and unsafe, according to family members. Yang’s family said he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder more than a decade ago. (Garrova, 6/12)

San Diego Union-Tribune: San Diego Settles Lawsuit With Son Of Woman Who Died In SDPD Custody 
The San Diego City Council voted Tuesday to approve an $875,000 settlement for the son of Aleah Marie Jenkins, a 24-year-old woman who fell into a coma in the back of a police vehicle during a 2018 arrest and later died in a hospital. Jenkins’ death was ruled an accidental drug overdose, and District Attorney Summer Stephan declined to charge the officers involved, but Jenkins’ young son filed a lawsuit through his father in 2019 against the city, the San Diego Police Department and officers Lawrence Durbin and Jason Taub. (Riggins, 6/11)

Los Angeles Times: California Beach Tops List Of Nation's Most Polluted Beaches
California is home to one of the most polluted beaches in the country, according to a new study — a stretch of surf so toxic officials have made repeated calls for a state of emergency. Last year, the Surfrider Foundation tested thousands of water samples across the nation, as well as in Puerto Rico, Vancouver and Costa Rica, and found that 64% of the 567 sites tested had at least one sample with unsafe bacteria levels. Each location was tested multiple times, said Mara Dias, the foundation’s senior manager for the Clean Water Initiative. (Tchekmedyian, 6/12)

KVPR: African Ancestry Genes May Be Linked To Black Americans' Risk For Some Brain Disorders
Black Americans are known to be at higher risk of some neurological disorders, and the reasons for this disparity remain unclear. Now, after examining the postmortem brains of 151 people, researchers in Baltimore have identified genes that may help explain why. In those people, who all identified as Black or African American, the scientists analyzed the influence of two different ancestries: African and European. They found that genes associated with African ancestry appear to affect certain brain cells in ways that could increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and stroke. (Hamilton, 6/12)

Los Angeles Times: Searching For Antibiotics That Don't Harm The Gut Microbiome
Inside every human is a thriving zoo of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microscopic organisms collectively known as the microbiome. Trillions of microbes live in the digestive tract alone, a menagerie estimated to contain more than 1,000 species. This ecosystem of tiny stuff affects our health in ways science is only beginning to understand, facilitating digestion, metabolism, the immune response and more. But when serious infection sets in, the most powerful antibiotics take a merciless approach, wiping out colonies of beneficial bacteria in the digestive tract and often prompting secondary health problems. (Purtill, 6/12)