San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/category/health/)
Disbelieving a child’s allegation of abuse based on the notion that the other parent brainwashed them into lying is a hotly debated legal tactic called parental alienation.
A growing chorus of international media coverage, medical groups and judicial bodies are expressing doubts over the validity of this legal defense tactic and of its practitioners.
More than one month after statewide eviction protections expired on June 30, less than 4% of rent relief funds requested by San Francisco households remain unprocessed, with 55% of funds paid out.
Nearly 700 live-in patients at Laguna Honda Hospital were thrown into chaos this spring after a series of damning inspections led the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to pull funding and mandate a closure plan for the facility.
It’s a dire situation for residents of the skilled nursing facility who have specialized needs that make them hard to place elsewhere. Hospital administrators are scrambling to attain the recertification needed to continue to receive federal funding.
Two former Laguna Honda physicians say they have continued to warn city officials about this looming crisis after first flagging it 18 years ago. That’s when a Department of Public Health policy began admitting to Laguna Honda patients whose needs fell outside the scope of a typical nursing home for the elderly.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfurled recently in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for its largest display in a decade, marking the start of a campaign to educate the public about a disease that, since 1981, has infected 1.2 million people nationwide.
While new HIV infections in the United States have been in decline, the disease continues to take a disproportionate toll on racial and ethnic minorities, men who identify as gay or bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. The highest rates of new infections and numbers of untreated people are found in the South.
Organizers estimated that 20,000 people visited the San Francisco quilt display June 11 and 12. This fall, sections of the quilt will be taken on a tour of the South for “large displays in city centers, as well as smaller displays in rural, non-metro areas,” said Dafina Ward, executive director of the Southern AIDS Coalition. New names will be added to the 35-year-old quilt during the tour, she said.
After two years of focusing on COVID-19 pandemic response, the Biden Administration is renewing attention to other ongoing public health challenges, including HIV and AIDS. The response is led by Harold Phillips, director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy. The San Francisco Public Press spoke with Phillips this month when he came to San Francisco to participate in events tied to the display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Golden Gate Park.
Over the past several months, health care providers have been warning San Francisco officials that while the city was focused on fighting COVID-19, rates of HIV infection and related illnesses were creeping in the wrong direction.
From the very beginning, and throughout the HIV epidemic, which began in 1981, San Francisco led the way in prevention, care and treatment that came to be recognized around the world.
The key to addressing San Francisco’s overdose crisis, say community activists and medical experts in the city, is harm reduction. That’s an approach that acknowledges not all drug users will achieve abstinence, and that focuses on keeping them safe and alive if they’re not ready or able to quit. Drug overdoses killed more people in San Francisco than did COVID-19 in the first two years of the pandemic — 711 deaths in 2020, and 645 in 2021.
In San Francisco, drug overdoses killed more people than did COVID-19 in the first two years of the pandemic — 711 deaths in 2020, and 645 in 2021. These figures are troubling, even without counting nonfatal overdoses and other suffering associated with this crisis. While fentanyl is often cited for the rapid increase, many factors contribute to this trend both in San Francisco and nationally.
A bill introduced Thursday in the California Assembly would extend eviction protections by three months for tenants who have applied for emergency rent relief related to the coronavirus pandemic. The catch: To qualify, tenants who haven’t yet asked for help would need to submit applications by the end of March, giving them less than a week to get their requests in the queue.
Dr. Kim Rhoads, who has been working on community-led responses to the pandemic, says what should drive decision making and risk mitigation is simply how much virus is in the community.
Residents of San Francisco’s Treasure Island suffered half a dozen power outages in the three months after electrical upgrades were completed this July. That’s just the latest episode in what’s been an ongoing problem for the island.