California’s Head Start Programs Plunged Into Turmoil: Dozens of Head Start programs nationwide — including at least six in California — have experienced delays in accessing government money for payroll and expenses in the week since the Trump administration announced a freeze on federal funding. Read more from the Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times: Protesters Gather Near Children's Hospital L.A. to Advocate for Trans Youth Care
Hundreds of protesters rallied Thursday night in the rain outside Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, calling for the hospital to roll back recent restrictions on gender-affirming care for youth. Denying such care “goes against every ethical standard we are taught in medicine and nursing. It ignores decades of research, the guidance of every major medical organization and the lived experiences of trans people,” family nurse practitioner Jordan Davis told the crowd packed onto the sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard. (Alpert Reyes, 2/6)
Los Angeles Blade: Leading California Officials Address Gender-Affirming Care Suspension
Following Trump’s executive order, healthcare facilities like the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and St. John’s Community Health paused gender affirming care and grants that would expand those resources. The Children’s Hospital of LA has been known as a refuge from discrimination in a country that has set forth many restrictions for trans healthcare and other barriers for equitable access to life-saving services. (Palomera, 2/6)
The 19th: NCAA Reverses 15-Year Policy, Bans Trans Women from Women's Sports
The largest college sports governing body in the country has completely banned transgender women student-athletes from competing in women’s sports, following President Donald Trump’s executive order threatening federal funding for schools that allow trans girls on girls’ teams. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) on Thursday rescinded its former guidance for transgender student-athletes, which had been in place since 2010 and was amended in 2022. (Rummler, 2/6)
California Challenges Trump's Ban On Transgender Athletes From Women's Sports: President Donald Trump on Wednesday banned trans females from girls’ and women’s sports teams in schools across the nation. But the California Interscholastic Federation says it will continue to follow state law allowing trans students to participate according to their gender identity. Read more from the San Francisco Chronicle.
California Clinics Face Funding Cuts Amid Federal Transgender Healthcare Restrictions
A Los Angeles health clinic says it’s losing federal funding as a result of President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting transgender people. St. John’s Community Health, one of the largest free and reduced-cost providers in Los Angeles, reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday terminated a $1.6 million grant that was supposed to support its transgender health and social services program. (Hwang, 2/4)
Trump Administration's Proposed Cuts to Federal Health Workforce Raise Concerns
The White House is working on an executive order to fire thousands of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services workers, according to people familiar with the matter. Under the order, the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies would have to cut a certain percentage of employees. (Whyte and McKay, 2/6)
Global Health Programs Disrupted by USAID Shutdown
Asanda Zondi received a startling phone call last Thursday, with orders to make her way to a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection. The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her. The device, a silicone ring inserted into her vagina, needed to be removed right away. (Nolen, 2/6)
Kaiser Permanente Under Fire Again for Mental Health Care—A System-Wide Issue
Mental health workers on strike in Southern California say Kaiser Permanente is woefully understaffed, its therapists are burned out, and patients are often denied timely access to care. The insurer says it has largely fixed the problem. But across California and the nation, mental health parity is still not a reality. (Bernard J. Wolfson, 2/6)
Becker's Hospital Review: The Rising Effort to Destigmatize Mental Health in Nursing Licensure
The National Council of State Boards of Nursing is working on national recommendations to remove invasive mental health questions from nursing licensure applications, Medscape reported Feb. 5. The potential changes come amid a growing movement to destigmatize mental health among providers. Here are four things to know about this trend: 1. Nursing licensing boards in 30 states ask questions about mental illness on their applications and 22 boards ask about past mental health diagnoses and require predictions of future impairment. (Taylor, 2/5)
Axios: Black Maternal Mortality Rate Remains Unchanged, According to CDC Data
The mortality rate for Black mothers in the U.S. has not improved, per data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The pregnancy-related death rate for Black women is more than three times the rate for mothers of other racial and ethnic groups. (Mallenbaum, 2/6)
ABC News: Black Kidney Patients Gain Renewed Hope Following Transplant List Rule Change
Since the 1990s, a race-based method for assessing kidney function placed many Black patients lower on the transplant waitlist. However, thousands of these patients were moved up the list in recent years when a widely used lab test was found to calculate results differently for Black patients. "We have a long history in this country of actually biases against certain transplant candidates, in particular African Americans, because of the way that we calculate how bad the kidney function is," Dr. Edmund Pribitkin, a professor at Thomas Jefferson University, said. (Smith and Louallen, 2/4)
MedPage Today: Public Health Journal Refuses to Be Complicit in Trump Administration's Censorship
Studies censored by government employees will have a tough time getting published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), the journal's leadership said during an interview with MedPage Today's editor in chief. "We at the American Journal of Public Health have no interest in following the president's prohibitions on language," said Georges Benjamin, MD, publisher of AJPH and executive director of its parent organization, the American Public Health Association. (Fiore, 2/4)
The New York Times: C.D.C. Reinstates Some Purged Files Following Outcry Over ‘Gender Ideology’ Ban
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention purged from its website thousands of pages that included terms such as “transgender,” “L.G.B.T.” and “pregnant person,” to comply with an executive order barring any material that promoted “gender ideology.” By Monday, some of the pages had reappeared, in part in response to intense media coverage, backlash from the scientific community and concern for the public’s health, according to a senior official with knowledge of the matter. (Mandavilli and Caryn Rabin, 2/3)
CalMatters: California Voters Reject Plan to Maintain Children's Medi-Cal Coverage
Each year nearly 400,000 children with Medi-Cal health insurance lose coverage for a period of time and then must re-enroll. Often they still qualify for publicly subsidized health care but get kicked off because of administrative errors or lost paperwork. Sometimes their families miss the income cutoff by a couple hundred dollars for a few months. That’s a problem, advocates say, because early childhood comes with a host of vital health checks, vaccinations and developmental screenings. Without them, kids are at risk of falling behind on language development and social behaviors or missing early disease detection. (Hwang, 2/3)
CBS News: Children's Hospital Of Philadelphia Doctor Excited After World's Smallest Heart Pump FDA-Approved For Kids
A new high-tech help for young heart patients has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Doctors say this will allow them to save more lives, an important milestone as we kick off American Heart Month. It's a little device with a big job. "It does all the work for your heart," Katrina Penney, 21, said. "It did save my life, 100%." It is the Impella 5.5 – the world's smallest heart pump that helps blood circulate. (Stahl and Kuhn, 2/3)
ABC News: CDC Study Suggests Long COVID Affects Over 1 Million Children
More than 1 million children may have been affected by long COVID in 2023, new federal data published Monday suggests. Long COVID, a condition that occurs when patients still have symptoms at least three months after clearing infection, has been well-documented in adults, but its impact on children has been less clear. (Kekatos and Wachuku, 2/3)
MedPage Today: States with Higher Numbers of Maternal-Fetal Specialists See Lower Maternal Death Rates
States with more maternal-fetal medicine physicians had lower rates of maternal mortality, according to a cross-sectional analysis of nearly 15 million births. States with a low density of these specialists had an adjusted maternal mortality rate of 24.25 per 100,000 live births compared with 16.96 per 100,000 live births for states with a high density (incidence rate ratio 0.70, 95% CI 0.58-0.85), reported Tetsuya Kawakita, MD, MS, of Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, during a presentation at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine annual meeting. (Robertson, 2/3)
Becker's Hospital Review: Healthgrades Reveals 50 Top Hospitals for 2025
Healthgrades has recognized 250 U.S. hospitals [11 of them in California] as part of its 2025 America's Best Hospitals Awards. The top 50 hospitals represent the 1% of U.S. hospitals providing the highest level of quality care, according to a Jan. 28 news release. Healthgrades evaluated the clinical performance of approximately 4,500 hospitals across more than 30 common procedures and conditions, the release said. (Gregerson, 1/31)