California Department of Health Services

Warning: Don't Eat the Shellfish From Marin County

Hey pescatarians, take note. The California Department of Public Health is warning hungry people not to eat harvested mussels, clams, or whole scallops that come from Marin County where dangerous levels of paralytic shellfish poisoning toxins have been detected in this region. Specifically, the to ... More >>

One Million Kids in California Are Uninsured, and Most Qualify for Subsidized Programs

More than one million children in California do not have health insurance coverage, according to a report released this month by the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine. The figure represents around 11 percent of the states minors. That rate, 1.5 percent higher than the nat ... More >>

Medical Marijuana Is Still too Expensive

Being poor is not so bad. Not in San Francisco at least, where in addition to free housing, city officials are now also handing out taxpayer-subsidized puppies to panhandlers. The disabled, terminally ill, or downright dirt-poor also "enjoy" an advantage over the healthy or the merely struggling to ... More >>

Keep VD Out of Valentine's Day, Use a Condom

​While they have the attention of lovers and horny people everywhere, health officials are camping onto Valentine's Day to promote National Condom Week. And that's probably a good idea, considering the news last week detailing San Francisco's STD problem. Today, the California Family Health Counci ... More >>

Shawn Williams, Former City Employee, Accused of Stealing Personal Information

​A former Human Services Agency employee appeared in court Tuesday afternoon where she pleaded not guilty to multiple charges claiming she stole Social Security and other confidential information from more than 3,000 Medi-Cal applicants. Prosecutors say, starting in 2006, Shawn Williams, who was a ... More >>

S.F. Restaurants Are Not Required to Serve Free Tap Water

bterrycompton​This week at SFoodie we were wondering whether restaurants are required, by law, to serve tap water for free. It's a simple enough question, but it took a surprising amount of digging to figure out the answer. The Internet provided a few thousand people asking the same question ... More >>

Call Ed Lee 'Mayor Pothole' -- 90 Percent Are Filled on Time

Guaranteed fixed in three days or less!​New York's Alphonse D'Amato was once known as "Senator Pothole" for his attention to constituent minutiae. But we wonder whether his attentiveness ever earned a reward like this one: San Francisco has marked a 200 percent improvement when it comes to filling ... More >>

Blowing Smoke: Obama Promises One Thing, Does Another on Medical Marijuana

Government lets fraudulent drug companies deal with Medicare

Labor Pains

A fight between two unions here could set the course of the U.S. labor movement.

Nickel and Dime-Obsessed Chronicle Hooks Human Tragedies to Taxpayer Costs

Ah, but how much was that chalk?​Mark Shotley, the paraplegic, incontinent, pneumonia-ridden homeless man The San Francisco Chronicle characterized nine years ago as a drag on city health care funds, is dead now. But the macabre, nickel-and-dime-obsessed journalistic tic that led the paper to couc ... More >>

Just About Everybody in S.F. Loses With State's Budget Cuts -- But Losing Less Is the New Winning

​When the city controller yesterday announced state budget cuts will deal San Francisco a $26.5 million punch in the gut, your humble narrator immediately thought of Jon Lovitz. Just as the Saturday Night Live nebbish once pitched himself to single women with the battle cry "Lower your standards!" ... More >>

The Man Who Cried Dust

Christopher Muhammad's fight with Lennar over toxic dust has resulted in a restraining order against him, an accusation that he's a shakedown artist, and grudging respect from his rivals.

Hey DJ! (Monday) Q&A: DJ RasCue

DJ RasCue has been hitting the decks longer than most of the kids in the clubs these days have been alive. For the past 26 years, he's spun a mix of everything from Latin to hip-hop to house and rock for little kids and big stars (William H. Macy). Now the local music community is giving something b ... More >>

SF's Staph Problem, Please Report to the State

Stern Reprimand

SEIU members in Northern California challenge the national boss over his collaboration with employers

That Is High

Medical marijuana smokers face a 1,000-percent increase in cost of state ID card, which could force its demise

Rogue Wave asks for a little help from its friends

Let Us Now Praise Tough Cookies

Who, in the populist tradition, fight for the rights

Onward, Christian Lawyers

Why lawsuits filed by anti-abortion activists may be a blessing in disguise for the California stem cell institute

Gutted

How the nursing home industry, organized labor, John Burton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are cooperating to guarantee giant health care corporations huge profits -- using billions of your dollars

Letters to the Editor

Week of Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Partners in Slime

The California service employees' union and the nursing home industry join forces to increase corporate profit, grow union membership, and sell out abused nursing home patients

Brain Storms

A City Hall plan to downgrade S.F.'s only long-term-care facility for the severely mentally ill has critics up in arms

Candy Says

The true story of a rare illness

Chlorine, Benzene, Vinyl Chloride, Trichloroethylene, Beryllium, Nickel, PCBs ...

Even if radioactivity were ignored, Hunters Point Shipyard would be one of the planet's most polluted properties

Q: What's the Opposite of a Miracle?

A: What the state does to the families of people who die while poor

Too Young to Die

They are the "AIDS babies." Born before doctors learned how to prevent HIV transmission to newborns, hundreds of California kids are growing up under the burden of a deadly disease.

Worst of the Lot

Bay Area nursing home regulation lags behind state

Opening Pandora's Box

Once-secret documents reveal the tobacco industry's battle to gut anti-smoking education in California. Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and former Gov. Pete Wilson helped.

Committee of Discord

Miffed citizen advisers want city Health Plan chief fired

Inside the Big Floop

Threatening Mount Zion means curtains for the clowns who have mismanaged the UCSF-Stanford hospital merger

Diagnosis: Eviction

An out-of-state company mismanaged its Mill Valley nursing home, then closed it down, casting dozens of elderly patients to the winds. Within months, 10 of them were dead.

Rays of Hope

Political winds may blow in long overdue nursing care reform

What the Hellman Is Going on Here?

UCSF Stanford finances hit the rocks

Sutter's Giant Sucking Sound

Sutter Health, which owns one of California's largest hospital empires, is a nonprofit, tax-exempt charity. Critics wonder why Sutter dispenses so little charity, and vacuums so much profit, from the hospitals it acquires.

The Illusion of Roe V. Wade

While feminists loudly celebrate the 25th anniversary of legalized abortion, quiet changes in the medical landscape make the procedure less and less available

inadequate.doc

Dr. Howard Thornton bragged that his state-of-the-art computer system let him take on 1,000 patients a month, scattered across Northern California. But do his patients get anything like quality medical help?

Letters

The AIDS Civil War

The promise of a new treatment has opened a painful divide

Nickel-and-Diming Problem Kids

In the name of fiscal prudence, Congress has ordered that a whole class of poor, troubled children be "redetermined"

Pinstriped Medicine

How the UCSF-Stanford hospital merger foreshadows the new -- and sometimes frightening -- world of health care

Profiles in Enfranchisement

Meet three Latinos who just cast the first U.S. votes of their lives

The Grid

Trickledown Health Care

Hospitals and nursing homes call it "subacute care," but for some patients, it's just a death sentence

Give Me Your Healthy

The immigration crackdown has Latinos fleeing mainstream medicine

A Wasting of Time

An existing drug offers hope for AIDS wasting syndrome -- if you can get it

Getting Hep

Hepatitis B is the Rodney Dangerfield of diseases: It just can't get respect. But it sure can kill you.

Letters

Why Medi-Cal Makes Doctors Sick

Money, paperwork and stigma