Health
On Saturday, at the Oakland Zoo’s Snow Building, families reunited with the doctors and nurses who cared for their premature babies at the Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
The Oakland Hills Fire may have started on the ground, but the Eucalyptus trees surrounding people’s homes in the Oakland-Berkeley Hills helped it burn more and spread even further. The highly flammable non-native species accounted for 70 percent of the energy released through combustion of vegetation during the fire, according to the National Park Service. Twenty years after the fire, Eucalyptus trees still surround many homes and live in many of Oakland’s parks, while residents debate whether they should be saved or removed as fire hazards.
On Friday, parents, kids, and community leaders came out to Youth Uprising, a youth center in East Oakland, to help build a community playground. In six hours, the play area at Youth Uprising transformed from a slab of concrete to a playground that includes swings, monkey bars and artwork made by the kids who volunteered. “If you would have showed up here at 7:00 this morning, you would have seen an empty lot with a bunch of concrete,” said Manuel…
In places like Oakland, where local authorities treat syringe exchange as an accepted public health practice, groups like HEPPAC no longer face the risk of arrest. Today their challenge is going mainstream, and needle exchange programs are now reaching for the biggest government seal of approval of all—federal funding.
The ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) jointly sent a public records request to the Oakland Police Department this week, asking for detailed information about the arrests and use of force in response to the Occupy Oakland confrontations.
Frick Middle School’s new on-site health center, which has been open to students since mid-October, is the newest addition to the Oakland Unified School District’s nine school-based health centers, all providing medical, mental health and health education services for students and their families—at no cost, and in a place that is already part of their daily lives.
Families, physicians and volunteers came out to Children’s Hospital this weekend in support of the third annual Radiotón Para Nuestros Niños, a fundraiser in partnership with Spanish radio station KRZZ 93.3 LA RAZA.
Katherine Sherwood, whose show He-Charmers opened last week at The Compound Gallery, located in the Golden Gate arts district in North Oakland, has included a number of her own angiograms in the mixed media pieces that comprise her collection. Fourteen years ago, Sherwood, a professor of art and disabilities studies at UC Berkeley, had a massive cerebral hemorrhage in the left side of her brain—a stroke—that almost took her life and left her mostly paralyzed on the right side of her body. She had to learn how to walk, talk, think and paint all over again.
Alameda County health executives and government officials hope the launch of a new website that will help residents like Wan and those who are underinsured or uninsured connect with medical resources faster and more easily. ACHealthCare.org, which officially launched last week, is the nation’s first website that compiles free and low-cost local health resources into a searchable database.