Berkeley Free Clinic Outreach

Some important updates to our Wednesday night services! Our drop-in sexual health clinic (Wed 7-9 at 2339 Durant) now has enough support from licensed providers that we can provide care to symptomatic clients.

All our morning prayers for our protector who put his life on the life for women, children, and our speakers. He will go into another surgery this morning. We are praying for a strong and steadfast recovery. Please donate to the gofundme and share 🐻✊🏽❤️⚡️ gofundme.com/f/help-jacob-j…

1/ The city of San Pablo is set to build a regional police training center it estimates will cost $43.6 million It's a large investment for the small city, population about 30K, which spent about $66 on all its budget expenditures last year. My report: localnewsmatters.org/2023/09/23/san…

We're going on day 3 of unhealthy air due to wildfire smoke. Do you or someone you know need an air purifier to get through fire season? CHC purifiers were built by our Bay Area community to distribute for free, especially for neighbors who can't afford commercial options. DM us!

BFC still has enough bicillin to treat our clients, but the e-mails we're getting from the health department about alternative antibiotic regimens are getting increasingly "we don't know if this works, choose your own adventure" which I guess is the current mood in public health.

There's still a national shortage of bicillin, a form of long-acting penicillin used in treating syphilis. This is a basic medication that's been around since 1950 but for some reason in the U.S. the only company that makes it is Pfizer and the shortage will last into 2024.

Interestingly, this paper estimates that a dose of Gardasil, which was developed using government funding, costs less than $2 to manufacture, meaning Merck is marking up the price by a factor of >200 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Other companies make Hep A and Hep B vaccines, luckily, but Merck has a monopoly on the HPV vaccine (Gardasil). We're trying to find another way to keep offering this vaccine to our clients, but until then we're finishing out current clients' series and pausing on new ones.

The BFC used to provide several @Merck vaccines through their patient assistance program, which allowed us to offer vaccines to low income clients. Recently, they've required patients to provide more proof of income eligibility and have been rejecting all of our applications.

The world could be using modern technology to diagnose active TB, but because of corporate greed we are forced to cosplay the Victorian age with outdated and inferior testing. It's time to lower the cost of rapid PCR cartridges. #peopleoverprofits #Timefor5

Even if a clinic can afford the fancy GeneXpert rapid PCR machine, the cartridges needed for each test are excessively and unnecessarily expensive, keeping modern diagnostics out of reach for much of the world.

🧵Last year, we revived our tuberculosis program at the BFC, providing free drop-in TB screening, chest x-rays, and treatment referrals. Building out the curriculum to train our TB volunteers required me going down a TB rabbit hole, and I noticed something odd.