Berkeley Free Clinic

People experiencing homelessness in Berkeley continue to be affected by water insecurity and encampment sweeps.

Transphobia is not a new phenomenon, and thus, neither is transgender activism. Berkeley and the Bay Area as a whole have served as a nexus of much advocacy, which has often included LGBTQ+ rights.

The city of Berkeley rolled out a number of resources to help the homeless community navigate challenges associated with being unhoused during the COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, pandemic. With limited options for sheltering in place or following social distancing directives, Berkeley’s homeless community is particularly vulnerable to contracting the disease

Here's what we know about the city of Berkeley and UC Berkeley's campus response to COVID-19, more colloquially known as coronavirus.

Michael Diehl, an influential Berkeley activist for homeless and mentally ill people, died at 64 after a driver hit him in Newark on Sunday about 8:30 p.m., as first reported by Berkeleyside.

Campus officials are working to increase access to resources for underserved transgender individuals, according to UC Berkeley Gender Equity Resource Center Director Billy Curtis.

On Feb. 8, health policy professors Richard Scheffler and Stephen Shortell of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health released a proposal for funding a universal health care plan in California, estimating the cost of covering the uninsured population to be about $7 billion per year.

Over the last five years, California has seen a 45 percent increase in incidents of three major STIs — chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. In 2017, Berkeley reported 898 cases of chlamydia, 367 cases of gonorrhea and 33 cases of syphilis, according to provisional data released by the California Department of Public Health, or CDPH. The number of cases for these three STIs is the highest Berkeley has seen since 2013.

Berkeley will vote to ratify keeping the Berkeley Emergency Storm Shelter open an additional six weeks, after it was planned to close Sunday.

Amid the country’s biggest person-to-person outbreak of hepatitis A since the invention of the hepatitis vaccine in 1996, Berkeley Free Clinic is providing free hepatitis testing, education and vaccination to those in need.