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Kira Weibel was in eighth grade when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the student’s Altadena charter school, cutting off critical community connections. As the weeks and months of online learning and isolation dragged on, Weibel spiraled into a deep depression. That changed when the school, Aveson Global Leadership Academy, reopened a year later and brought back the social interaction. But now Weibel and thousands of other students who weathered the pandemic are struggling with another historic calamity: the Eaton and Palisades fires. (Watanabe and Miller, 1/15)

In the Beverly Grove neighborhood of Los Angeles, the asking rent for a two-bedroom condo jumped from $5,000 to $8,000 in the wake of the fires that started last week and have left thousands homeless. In Venice, a single-family house saw a jump of nearly 60%. In Santa Monica, an owner listed a five-bedroom house for $15,000 above what they were asking last year — a gain of more than 100%. (Dillon, Flemming, Khouri and Mehta, 1/15)

Sion Roy, MD, was on cardiac ICU service at Harbor UCLA Medical Center last week when he got a call from someone in his Big Rock neighborhood of Malibu. ... Though it was hours before the evacuation order, Roy, a cardiologist, was aware of the fires affecting Los Angeles because of the uptick in patients seeking care for cardiac issues, probably due to smoke and stress. But fire warnings had happened before, even last month with the Franklin fire that threatened his neighborhood. (Clark and Henderson, 1/15)

Armed with two garden hoses hooked up to a sputtering tap, Matthew Craig battled fire and smoke to save his house from the onslaught of flames that devastated much of Altadena, a once leafy corner of Los Angeles County. The wind felt like dragon’s breath, he said, and “we were all eating smoke.” But even though his home is secure, for now, it will be a long time before he and his family feel safe enough to go back. Every room in the house, he said, was covered in ash, dust, soot and dirt that the high winds had blown inside. (Tabuchi, 1/15)

The specific number of deaths and hospitalizations tied to wildfire smoke often are not well-known until months — if not years — after these natural disasters. That said, during the region’s recent wildfires, fire-related hospital visits spiked 16-fold across Los Angeles County, according to the county Department of Public Health. At its height, on Jan. 8, at least 81 people visited hospitals for burns or smoke exposure. (Briscoe, 1/16)

The Wildfire Conservancy is conducting a first-of-a-kind cancer study on firefighters battling the Palisades Fire. The goal is to track how the extreme conditions increase firefighters’ risk of cancer. The study comes after the International Agency for Research on Cancer officially classified firefighting as a carcinogenic profession. (Smith, 1/15)

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today confirmed another human H5N1 avian flu case in California, which likely reflects follow-up testing of a presumed positive involving a San Francisco child. The latest confirmation puts the national total since early 2024 to 67 cases, of which 38 are from California. (Schnirring, 1/15)

One in every 50 men in California has been violent against an intimate partner in the past year. Just under two percent of California men—the equivalent of some 280,000 individuals—self-reported perpetrating some form of intimate partner violence (IPV), or violence against a romantic partner, according to a new paper in the journal PLOS ONE. (Thomson, 1/15)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: New California Laws Target Medical Debt, AI Care Decisions, Detention Centers

As the nation braces for potential policy shifts under President-elect Donald Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” mantra, the nation’s most populous state and largest health care market is preparing for a few changes of its own. With supermajorities in both houses, Democrats in the California Legislature passed — and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed — laws taking effect this year that will erase medical debt from credit reports, allow public health officials to inspect immigrant detention centers, and require health insurance companies to cover fertility services such as in vitro fertilization. (Mai-Duc, 1/16)