As the volunteer director for the Bay Area Youth Dance Team, Vanessa Scott was shocked when one of her 15-year-old students became ensnared in the web of human trafficking and was forced into prostitution. Like many Bay Area residents, Scott was unaware that the San Francisco area ranks as one of the nation’s main hubs for human trafficking, a crime that includes sex trafficking, child labor, forced labor and domestic servitude.
In the 1980s, a diagnosis of HIV used to mean AIDS or even early death. Today, thanks to advances in medicine, Truvada could potentially eliminate the 50,000 new cases of HIV infections diagnosed each year, yet the medication continues to be dogged by controversy.
As the young female inmate from the San Francisco County Jail prepared to give birth to her first child at San Francisco General Hospital, she found comfort in the fact that she wasn’t alone. Sitting by her bedside was a doula, a trained nonclinical birth companion whom she had been working with for several months through the Bay Area’s Birth Justice Project.
With the aging Baby Boomer generation set to change the face of health care as we know it, hospitals across the country have begun preparing for the influx of older patients by looking at ways to improve both care and outcomes for senior patients with programs like Acute Care for Elders.
When Ross McGowan and his team of volunteers enter one of the classrooms at Healdsburg Elementary School, the students cheer excitedly. Their enthusiastic response isn’t because they remember McGowan from his thirty-plus years in Bay Area television, but rather because he comes bearing food.
A cutting-edge program run through the UC San Francisco School of Nursing is helping people with mental illness better manage all of their health needs.
Debi Faris still remembers the incredible sadness she felt after hearing a news report about a dead baby boy who was found in a duffel bag on the side of the Harbor Freeway in San Pedro. It was the spring of 1996, and the Yucaipa mother of three was haunted by the story of the infant who had been tossed from a speeding car.
It’s Saturday afternoon at the DeFremery Recreation Center in West Oakland, and several groups of children are watching intently as Quetzal Flores, a student at UC Berkeley and a volunteer with Oakland Youth Aspire, partially fills a few plastic bottles with vinegar and then attaches a balloon filled with baking soda to the top of the plastic bottles.
When Sara Wysuph of Santa Cruz learned that her brother-in-law Jason Jones had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, she was determined to help him and his family get the financial and emotional support they needed.
When Janna Woods was diagnosed with ovarian cancer last May, the Cupertino resident was unsure how she could possibly cope with the chronic back pain that had plagued her for years, combined with the onset of cancer pain.