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Ancient mastodon tooth washes ashore near Santa Cruz, is almost lost to unwitting jogger

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Ancient mastodon tooth washes ashore near Santa Cruz, is almost lost to unwitting jogger

Jennifer Schuh was walking along Rio Del Mar State Beach near Santa Cruz during the Memorial Day holiday when she spotted something unusual in the sand.

The foot-long object resembled a piece of driftwood, but Schuh wasn’t certain, so she took a picture of it, posted it on Facebook and asked if anyone could help identify it.

“People from Aptos find all kinds of stuff washed up on that beach, like horse teeth or fossilized sand dollars,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Well, shoot, I’m going to post this crazy thing because I have no idea what it is.’”

Someone in Facebook’s comments section tagged Wayne Thompson, a paleontologist at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. He identified the object as a molar belonging to a Pacific mastodon, an elephant-like mammal that existed between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, during the Ice Age.

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“This is an extremely important find,” Thompson wrote Schuh. “Give me a call when you get a chance.”

The Santa Cruz museum recently added the artifact to its collection — one of only three known specimens found in the area, Thompson said.

“When this tooth was fossilized, sea levels were 300 feet lower than they are today. Elephants and mammoths could walk out to the Channel Islands,” Thompson said. “It’s another piece of evidence that we have for climate change.”

Liz Broughton, the visitor experience manager at the Santa Cruz museum, thinks the devastating winter storm that hit Santa Cruz in January may have washed the mastodon tooth onshore.

Storms are known to uncover paleontological finds, but Thompson said this is the first time it’s happened in their region.

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But acquiring the mastodon tooth was not easy. After he saw the Facebook post, Thompson raced to the beach on Friday, but the tooth was gone.

“We were on pins and needles,” he said.

On Saturday, Thompson went on Instagram to ask if anyone knew the tooth’s whereabouts, and if they did, to call the museum. KRON 4 first reported about the missing tooth on Sunday.

“It was like a social media news blitz, just putting everything out to try to find out who might have taken the tooth,” Thompson said.

Two days later, the museum received a call from an unnamed person from Aptos who had picked up the tooth on the beach during a jog. He saw the news coverage of the missing molar, realized what the artifact he had found was and turned it in.

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“It’s really a testament to our community and the trust they have in us to care for objects like this,” Broughton said.

This isn’t the first time the museum has encountered remains of a mastodon. In 1980, 16-year-old Jim Stanton found a mastodon skull in the same creek at Rio Del Mar State Beach, Broughton said. Thompson excavated the skull and spent years repairing it for display.

The skull and a tooth belonging to a young mastodon are on permanent exhibit at the museum. The newly discovered molar will be studied and is expected to also be put on display.

“We all have studied history, but the minute you see something from the past that you can actually hold in your hands — it gives me goosebumps now just thinking about it,” Schuh said.

Based on the wear and tear of the tooth, museum staff estimates the mastodon was between 30 and 40 years old when it died in a nearby river valley.

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Thompson said the Santa Cruz museum might install a temporary exhibit to display the molar. Longer-term, staff are hoping to put together an exhibit about the extinct elephants that lived in the county.

“Any fossil we find helps to better fill in the gaps in our knowledge and paint a picture of what life looked like here in the past,” Broughton said. “The potential for the scientific value from this specimen is very high.”

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California communities are banning syringe programs. Now the state is fighting back in court

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California communities are banning syringe programs. Now the state is fighting back in court

As Indiana officials struggled to contain an outbreak of HIV among people who injected drugs, then-Gov. Mike Pence reluctantly followed the urgings of public health officials and cleared the way for an overwhelmed county to hand out clean syringes.

Pence was far from enthusiastic about launching the program in Scott County, but after it rolled out in 2015, the percentage of injection drug users there who said they shared needles dropped from 74% to 22%. Within a few years, the number of new HIV infections plummeted by 96% and new cases of hepatitis C fell by 76%.

The Sierra Harm Reduction Coalition wanted to keep those same diseases in check in California. The tiny nonprofit got approval from the state to deliver syringes in El Dorado County to prevent the spread of life-threatening illnesses.

Yet when the program was discussed at a December meeting of the county’s Board of Supervisors, the success story in Indiana held little sway. Faced with complaints about discarded needles and overdose deaths, the supervisors voted to prohibit syringe programs in the county’s unincorporated areas.

“These programs may work in other parts of California and throughout the United States, although I have my doubts,” Sheriff Jeff Leikauf said at the meeting. “El Dorado County does not want or need these types of programs.”

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El Dorado is among a growing number of California communities that have banned syringe programs, testing the state’s power and political will to defend them as a public health strategy. It is part of a broader pushback against “harm reduction” — the practical philosophy of trying to reduce the negative effects of drug use — as overdose deaths have soared.

Now California is fighting back. In a recently filed lawsuit, the Department of Public Health argued that local ordinances prohibiting syringe programs in El Dorado County were preempted by state law, making them unenforceable.

The state is seeking a court order telling El Dorado County and the city of Placerville, its county seat, to stop enforcing their bans and allow syringe programs to resume.

An El Dorado County spokesperson said Monday that the county does not comment on pending legal issues. Its district attorney, however, said he was outraged to learn of the lawsuit, saying that state leaders were “seeking to impose the normalization of hardcore drug use.”

“Don’t come into our county and double down on your failed policy,” El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson said in a statement. “Allowing addicts to use fentanyl and other hardcore drugs is exactly what has caused other California counties to experience a death rate that is out of control and getting worse.”

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Mona Ebrahimi, the city attorney for Placerville, said the city had put a 45-day temporary moratorium in place “to study the ongoing effects of syringe service programs in the city.”

“The city wants to protect the health, safety and welfare of its residents,” Ebrahimi said.

The California Department of Public Health has long endorsed handing out sterile syringes as a proven way to prevent dangerous infections from running rampant when people share contaminated syringes. Researchers have linked syringe programs with a roughly 50% reduction in HIV and hepatitis C.

“It sounds crazy: ‘Wait, you want to give out the tools to people to do this thing that we all agree is a bad idea?’” said Peter Davidson, a medical sociologist at UC San Diego. But it works, said Davidson, who called the programs “probably the best studied public health intervention of the last 70 years.”

Public health officials also see them as a crucial way to reach people who use drugs and link them to addiction and overdose-prevention services. In Seattle, for instance, researchers found that injection drug users who started going to a needle exchange were five times more likely to enter drug treatment than those who never went.

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Signs direct visitors to the syringe-exchange program at the Austin Community Outreach Center in Austin, Ind., in 2015. The program was set up to curb an outbreak of HIV among people who injected drugs.

(Darron Cummings / Associated Press)

And in California, harm reduction groups have been particularly effective in getting Narcan — a nasal spray that can reverse opioid overdoses — into the hands of people who need it.

It’s “hugely important to reduce overdose in the community, and these are the programs that do that,” said Barrot Lambdin, a health policy fellow at RTI International who studies the implementation of health interventions.

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Yet leaders in some cities and counties have strenuously rejected the health benefits of syringe programs.

In El Dorado County, local leaders asserted that the efforts of the Sierra Harm Reduction Coalition had not “meaningfully reduced” HIV or hepatitis C cases since its syringe program began four years ago and said the free needles were ramping up the risk of deadly overdoses, which they argued were a bigger threat.

Street scene shows trees with fall colors, cars and old buildings

The El Dorado County Courthouse in Placerville, Calif.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

Alessandra Ross, a harm reduction expert at the California Department of Public Health, disputed such arguments in a letter to county officials. Ross pointed out that in just one year, the coalition handed out more than 2,200 doses of medication to reverse opioid overdoses, saving at least 421 lives. Without the group’s efforts, she wrote, “El Dorado County could have potentially lost more than ten times as many people to overdose.”

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Under state law, the California Department of Public Health has the authority to approve syringe programs anywhere that deadly or disabling infections might spread through used needles, “notwithstanding any other law” that might say otherwise.

The agency argued that the “significant state and public interest in curtailing the spread of HIV, hepatitis, and other bloodborne infections extends to every jurisdiction in the state, especially since Californians travel freely throughout the state.”

After El Dorado County prohibited syringe services in unincorporated areas, the state public health department adjusted its authorization for the Sierra Harm Reduction Coalition program, limiting its operations to Placerville. In the court filing, the agency said it made the change out of concern for the coalition’s staff and volunteers, who could be at risk of arrest if they provided syringes in the unincorporated areas.

The nonprofit said when it stopped providing syringes outside of Placerville city limits, roughly 40% of its clients were cut off. In February, Placerville city officials passed their own urgency ordinance banning syringe programs for 45 days, exempting needle provision at health facilities.

Ebrahimi, its city attorney, said officials took that step “after CDPH concentrated their use by authorizing them only in Placerville and nowhere else in the county.”

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The Sierra Harm Reduction Coalition stopped providing syringes in Placerville as well, according to the state lawsuit. The coalition did not respond Monday to requests for comment on the suit.

El Dorado County and Placerville are not alone: A wave of local bans went into effect last year in Placer County after a harm reduction group from Sacramento sought state approval to hand out clean syringes. The county’s sheriff and its probation chief said in a letter to the state that the syringe program proposed by Safer Alternatives thru Networking and Education, or SANE, would “promote the use of addicting drugs” and lead to more “dirty needles discarded recklessly in our parks.”

The Placer County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ban syringe programs in its unincorporated areas. Cities including Auburn, Loomis and Rocklin banned them too.

“We are the ones who should make these kinds of decisions,” then-Mayor Alice Dowdin Calvillo said at a September meeting of the Auburn City Council, “and not allow the state to just bully us.”

Public health researchers stress that studies have found that free needle programs do not increase crime or drug use, or worsen syringe litter. Yet as much of Placer County became a no-go zone, SANE withdrew its application for a syringe program there.

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“Our political processes are not well set up for us to make reasoned, scientifically sound judgments about public health,” said Ricky Bluthenthal, a USC sociologist whose research has documented the effectiveness of syringe programs. It doesn’t help that “the populations at risk are often marginalized or not politically active.”

Our political processes are not well set up for us to make reasoned, scientifically sound judgments about public health.

— Ricky Bluthenthal, a USC sociologist who studies syringe programs

The California Department of Public Health declined to address whether it planned to challenge local bans on syringe programs elsewhere in the state, saying it “cannot comment on active litigation strategy.”

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Syringe programs have long faced public skepticism: In a 2017 survey, only 39% of U.S. adults said they supported legalizing them in their communities.

Experts say the programs have faced increasing jeopardy as public concern wanes about the threat of HIV and frustration swells over other problems like soaring numbers of overdose deaths and the spread of homeless encampments. Even in Indiana’s Scott County, local leaders voted three years ago to shutter its needle exchange.

Clashes are also arising because programs are making moves into new parts of California, bolstered in some cases by state funding. California officials also have taken steps to help syringe programs overcome local opposition, including exempting them from review under the California Environmental Quality Act.

“It’s not surprising that cities and counties are motivated to protect the public health and safety of their residents through whatever tools they have at their disposal,” said attorney David J. Terrazas, who represented a group that successfully sued to overturn state approval of a syringe program in Santa Cruz County.

In that case, a state appeals court ruled last year that the California Department of Public Health conducted an insufficient review of a program run by the Harm Reduction Coalition of Santa Cruz County. The department didn’t do enough to consult with law enforcement agencies in the area, among other shortcomings, the court said.

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Although the state health department had considered some comments from law enforcement, “it never engaged with them directly about their concerns,” the appeals court concluded. Internal records showed department staff had decided not to respond to some of their comments and called one police chief an “imbecile.”

Terrazas said local officials are best poised to know what works for their communities. But Denise Elerick, founder of the Harm Reduction Coalition of Santa Cruz County, argued it made no sense for law enforcement to hold sway in public health decisions.

“We wouldn’t consult with them on what to do about COVID,” Elerick said.

A bag is filled with boxes of Narcan nasal spray for distribution to people living on the street in Los Angeles.

A bag is filled with boxes of Narcan nasal spray, one of several harm-reduction supplies distributed to people living on the street in Los Angeles.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

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Weeks after the court ruling, the state health department rolled back its approval for a syringe program in Orange County that would have been run by the Santa Ana-based Harm Reduction Institute, saying it wanted to consult more with local officials.

The decision was celebrated by city leaders in Santa Ana, who had banned syringe programs in 2020 and sharply opposed efforts to restart one. At a recent meeting, interim city manager Tom Hatch said a previous program was “an epic failure” that left its downtown littered with used syringes.

Orange County is currently the most populous county in the state without any syringe services programs — to the alarm of health researchers who found that syringe reuse increased after a local program was shut down.

The Santa Cruz court ruling was also invoked by the Santa Monica City Council, which directed city officials to investigate how Los Angeles County came to approve a program run by the Venice Family Clinic. That program sends outreach workers into Santa Monica parks once a week to offer clean syringes, Narcan and other supplies and connect people with healthcare, including for addiction.

A woman hands out Narcan to a man at Tongva Park in Santa Monica

Devon O’Malley, left, a harm reduction case manager with the Venice Family Clinic, hands out Narcan to Ken Newark at Tongva Park in Santa Monica.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

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Critics want the program to relocate indoors, which they say would better protect parkgoers from discarded syringes. In addition, “if someone has to walk inside, there’s a chance for counselors to suggest strongly that it’s time for them to get off the drugs,” said Santa Monica Mayor Phil Brock, who wants the city to formally express its opposition to the program. “We can’t just facilitate their demise.”

Last month, a group called the Santa Monica Coalition filed suit to get L.A. County to halt the program it approved, saying it should instead be in a government building.

But Venice Family Clinic staffers said unhoused people can be reluctant to leave behind their belongings to go elsewhere. Even offering services out of a van reduced participation, said Arron Barba, director of the clinic’s Common Ground program.

“Bringing the service directly to the people is what we know works,” Barba said.

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Opinion: How measles reemerged as a threat in California and elsewhere

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Opinion: How measles reemerged as a threat in California and elsewhere

The measles virus is resurging in the U.S. despite the long-standing availability of a vaccine that provides nearly life-long immunity. In the past few weeks, hundreds of people were exposed to a child with the virus in a Northern California healthcare facility; our state is one of 17 jurisdictions with reported measles cases in 2024, higher than seen in recent years.

Measles is an extremely transmissible pathogen: On average, one infected person infects 12 to 18 unvaccinated people. The airborne virus can linger in floating aerosols long after someone has left a room, and the common symptoms, which include rash, a high fever, watery eyes, cough and a runny nose, typically take a week or two to appear.

Infections can also cause immune amnesia, in which your immune system becomes better at fighting measles and worse at fighting other infections you were previously protected against. In rare cases it also leads to death, more often in children than adults, from respiratory or neurological complications, including a type of brain swelling in young children that can appear years after the initial measles infection.

Before the measles vaccine was introduced and licensed in 1963, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites an annual average of 549,000 cases (with likely millions more going unreported), 48,000 hospitalizations, nearly 500 deaths and 1,000 people with chronic disability. By 2000, thanks to vaccination, measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. But because of cases from people arriving here from other countries, combined with pockets of low vaccination, we are seeing outbreaks among unvaccinated people.

Policy can worsen the issue. Last month in Florida, following an outbreak at an elementary school, the state’s surgeon general left the decision to parents whether to send their children to school, citing high levels of community immunity as the rationale for not following the usual protocols. That cavalier response risked a much worse outbreak. A more standard response would have called for unvaccinated students and staff to be vaccinated and quarantine for 21 days (the time frame in which the disease could develop).

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It might be tempting to Californians to dismiss this as a Florida problem. But our state has a measles time bomb on our hands. Ideally communities should hit at least 95% vaccination to achieve herd immunity. But a recent nationwide survey found that Southern California alone has 350 schools falling short of the desired vaccination threshold, meaning a single measles case in these schools could easily become an outbreak among the unvaccinated.

Misinformation around the measles vaccine has been an issue for years. A debunked but influential 1998 research paper in the Lancet, a British medical journal, suggested a link between the vaccine, which babies can receive starting at the age of 12 months, and autism. The paper was retracted in 2010 (and the authors were later reported to have committed fraud). But measles vaccine rates dropped in England throughout the early 2000s.

In California, a 2014 outbreak at Disneyland was connected to more than 140 cases in North America, with declining vaccination rates one contributing factor. A recent systematic review of the reasons why parents reject measles vaccination for their children found fear of autism the most cited concern. Those who were hesitant more frequently cited the internet and social media as information sources on vaccines than those who were not hesitant.

In recent years hesitancy has grown as misinformation about the COVID vaccine has made some parents doubtful of routine inoculations. Vaccination exemptions during the 2022-23 school year reached the highest level ever reported in the U.S., increasing in 40 states and Washington, D.C., and 10 states reaching exemption rates of above 5%. According to the CDC, the 93.1% vaccination rate among eligible children puts about 250,000 kindergarten students at risk for measles.

Encouragingly, we’ve seen in our own state that vaccine hesitancy can be reversed. Marin County had among the lowest measles vaccination rates in the state in 2011 and now has coverage close to 99% among children entering school. State contact tracing efforts that were strengthened during COVID-19, including the California Connected program, have been useful to track the contacts of measles cases.

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But as the recent scares remind us, we still aren’t where we need to be with vaccination. Following the Disneyland outbreak, in 2015 California passed a law to remove the “personal belief” exemption from required childhood vaccines, meaning people must provide a medical reason to decline it. The law broadened the criteria for medical exemptions, which increased the year after it passed. Although the state tightened up medical exemptions with a new law in 2019, with the pandemic disrupting routine vaccinations and increasing homeschooling, the percentage of kindergarteners not up to date on vaccinations went up by 2021.

Vaccine exemption laws vary widely across the U.S., with some states allowing only medical exemptions, some also allowing religious exemptions and others permitting philosophical exemptions too. And outbreaks from one state can spill over across borders quickly.

That means decisions by Florida’s public health department, and vaccine hesitancy anywhere, can affect us all. California has to close the gap for communities that are not well-protected against measles.

Abraar Karan is an infectious disease doctor and researcher at Stanford University, where Julie Parsonnet is a professor of infectious diseases and of epidemiology and population health.

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Video: SpaceX Launches Starship for Third Time

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Video: SpaceX Launches Starship for Third Time

new video loaded: SpaceX Launches Starship for Third Time

transcript

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SpaceX Launches Starship for Third Time

The rocket, a version of which will eventually carry NASA astronauts to the moon, traveled almost halfway around the Earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere.

“Five, four, three, two, three, one.” “This point, we’ve already passed through Max-Q, maximum dynamic pressure. And passing supersonic, so we’re now moving faster than the speed of sound. Getting those on-board views from the ship cameras. Boosters now making its way back, seeing six engines ignited on ship. Kate, we got a Starship on its way to space and a booster on the way back to the Gulf.” “Oh, man. I need a moment to pick my jaw up from the floor because these views are just stunning.”

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