Health
Dozens of Kaiser employees from the National Union of Healthcare Workers and the California Nurses Association hit the streets Thursday in front of Richmond’s Kaiser location to picket proposed cuts to NUHW employees’ healthcare and retirement benefits.
The Bay Area Air Quality Management District board of directors voted Wednesday to postpone the Blueprint for Healthy Communities Summit, citing cost and conflict-of-interest concerns.
If a natural disaster were to strike, there’s a good chance West Contra Costa County residents—like those in any place around the nation—could be left waiting. Waiting for food, waiting for water, waiting for basic needs as emergency personnel scramble to find survivors and assess the immediate damage. The threat of disaster is especially real in coastal Richmond and its surrounding towns, which are located on the Hayward Fault and are at risk of tsunami, industrial disasters and especially earthquakes….
Forty Richmond Kaiser employees plan to join more than 20,000 Kaiser workers statewide in picketing Thursday to protest administrators’ proposed plan to reduce healthcare and retirement benefits for union workers. About 4,000 Kaiser caregivers represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers — including 1,500 psychologists, social workers and optical workers in Northern California — face benefit cuts under the proposed contract, said Leighton Woodhouse, NUHW’s director of communications. The crowds are expected to be largest at Kaiser headquarters in…
Vieng Say Lasey Song Kham was stoic as he pulled up his T-shirt sleeve at the last community Tdap clinic in San Pablo last week. A Contra Costa County registered nurse gently swabbed his shoulder before flicking the syringe and poking the small needle into his upper arm, a process that took only a second but could make a big difference when it comes to protecting Lasey Song Kham and others from contracting pertussis, a contagious disease that killed ten…
Richmond-based Sangamo BioSciences, Inc. said Wednesday it is ready to take its HIV and AIDS research – which has the potential to someday provide a functional cure for HIV – to a national conference and announce the results of a clinical trial this weekend. The research firm, located in Point Richmond, will attend the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in Chicago on Saturday, where it will present findings on the application of gene modification as a treatment for…
After a series of foul odors released from its sewage treatment plant over the last year, the multinational company Veolia may only have 90 days left in Richmond. Although the City Council had considered terminating the contract immediately at the council meeting Tuesday, council members opted to consider the arguments and the possibility of alternatives, and set a decision on the contract for Dec. 6. Mark Russell, a lawyer who is providing the city with outside legal counsel, said Tuesday…
The City Council narrowly failed to pass an ordinance Tuesday that would have required the three medical marijuana collectives in Richmond to purchase their marijuana from suppliers that either grow their crop outside without the use of artificial light, or indoors with solar-powered light.
The California Association of Code Enforcement Officers has awarded Richmond’s “One Block at a Time” project with the title of Innovative Code Enforcement Program of the Year. OBAT partners local residents with the Richmond Police Department’s Code Enforcement Unit to target neighborhood blight. The CACEO chose the initiative from a competitive pool of other code enforcement programs throughout the state. Code Enforcement Unit Manager Tim Higares, who has worked in Richmond with OBAT for three of its five years, said…