United States: Over 50 attendees of a California music festival during summer contracted Valley fever, with at least eight of them being admitted to the intensive care unit.
Valley fever, which is a fungal disease, is on the rise in California, and it will persist until the early part of fall.
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Experts noted that valley fever is not only a problem in California. This lung infection is caused by Coccidioides, a fungus that is present in the dust in the Pacific Northwest, the southwestern part of the USA, and some parts of Latin America.
Valley fever is formally known to affect up to 10,000 Americans every year. The majority of the cases are from Arizona, and 30 percent of all the cases are from California.
More about the disease
Valley fever has been on the increase in the southwestern region of the United States, especially in recent years, partly because of climate change and drought.
Coccidioides can thrive in hot, dry environments, and humans are at risk of getting infected through inhalation of spores of the fungus that reside in the soil.
Thus, many people with Valley fever will not know they have the infection since they may not even have symptoms or are convinced that the symptoms they do have stem from another respiratory disease.
After getting exposed to the Coccidioides spores, it can take one to three weeks for the disease symptoms of Valley fever to show. Some of the signs are high temperature, flu-like symptoms, cold, headache, difficulty in breathing, sweating at night, muscle pains, or rashes mainly on the legs and upper part of the body.
According to John Galgiani, MD, director of the Valley Fever Center for Excellence at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson, “The numbers that have been discovered around this particular music festival almost certainly are an underestimate of all those that are out there because a lot of people most likely had an illness which you couldn’t tell from influenza or some other respiratory infection, and just weren’t tested and eventually got over it on their own,” yahoo news reported.
Symptoms of valley fever
Whilst it is not an infectious disease mainly, there are many cases where the affected people recover without ever having been to a hospital; it may take a long time for a person with symptoms to start to feel better, as it can take weeks or even months to overcome.
Furthermore, however, 10 percent of the people who develop Valley fever come down with some form of lung disease, and 1 percent suffer from meningitis, which is an ailment that has spread to the bones, skin, and central nervous system.
As per Galgiani, “Knowing about this disease is probably the best defense,” Yahoo News reported.