United States: According to experts, with the rising climate temperatures, the southwestern US is more liable to face weather fury, ranging from drought to floods in a cycle.
As a result, the region is also experiencing an outbreak of a disease that was not well known earlier, such as valley fever.
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Almost 20,000 people attended a Buena Vista Lake music festival in California in May 2004, wherein the following month, a minimum of nineteen developed valley fever, of which eight had to be hospitalized.
This incident is a massive jump of more than 800 percent in valley fever infection in California between 2000 and 2018, sciencealert.com reported.
In 2023, California had reported the second highest number of valley fever recorded so far, with more than nine thousand cases in the state.
Whereas from April 2023 to March 2024, there were 10,593 cases, which amounts to a forty percent jump during the same period the prior year.
About valley fever
Valley fever is another popular name for a disease known as coccidioidomycosis – a fungal infection that results from pathogenic fungi belonging to the Coccidioides family.
Most species of the fungi are known to thrive in arid regions of the southwest region of the United States, as well as in parts of Central and South America.
Where there is moisture and nutrients, the fungus forms long, slender, branching cords through the soil.
When the soil is dry, these chains break up into fungal spores, and it is possible that spores move throughout the air if the soil is stirred by wind or digging. They can then spread through the air in the form of spores and can be breathed in to cause respiratory disease.
Disease prevalence and symptoms
Valley fever most often occurs in California’s southern San Joaquin Valley and southern Arizona, but it has been rising in other locations.
Through the inhalation of the environment contaminated with the fungal spores of Coccidioides, its initial manifestations are in the lungs, presenting with signs such as mild to severe cough, fever, shortness of breath, chest pain, and fatigue, sciencealert.com reported.
In California, and perhaps in Arizona, as many as 30 percent of cases of community-acquired pneumonia are the result of infection with valley fever.
Still, few cases of CAP have ever been tested for it, meaning that the number of valley fever cases out in the community is probably far higher.
Of those diagnosed with the condition, just under half of the people reported their symptoms for two months or more before they were diagnosed.