, and the disease it causes is colloquially known as Valley Fever. It can be a brutal, often debilitating condition that can result in symptoms ranging from crushing headaches to sinus infections. And perhaps most troublingly, the illness, once contracted, can even transform into meningitis.
"It took everything — my health," Rob Purdie, a former financial planner and father of two whose life was upended by Valley Fever-caused meningitis, told the. "It had a huge impact on my family. We lost everything, all our financial security, all our retirement."requires harsh, dry conditions in order to survive. That means it's thrived amid the many nearly-waterless years seen in the state.
"There's enormously more Valley fever now. I can tell that just from the work," Dr. Royce Johnson, an infectious disease expert in the region, told the"Much of the western US is very dry already," Morgan Gorris, an earth system scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, added. "When we look at projections of climate change it's expected that the western half of the US will continue to remain pretty dry and that's going to continue to support Valley fever.
Importantly, the soil, if undisturbed, won't necessarily release the disease into the airways. But any disturbance, be that a full-scale archaeological dig or a burrowing animal, will unleash the fungus from soil to air. The disease-causing spores can then travel roughly 75 miles or so from where they were initially hatched.
"Somebody that lives in Long Beach and drives to the Bay Area and has their window rolled down on the 5 can get Valley fever," Johnson told the paper. "If you're doing an archaeological dig in the foothills west of [Bakersfield] you can … you're basically standing on top of it.", so the growing prevalence of a dangerous, debilitating fungus-wrought illness is alarming.
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