Valley fever starts with the simple act of breathing.
Fungal spores, lifted from the dry dirt by the wind, pass through your nostrils or down your throat, so tiny they don’t even trigger a cough. They lodge in your lungs. If you’re fortunate – and most people are – they go...
News
September 7, 2012
PHOENIX -- Among the unique aspects of life in the Valley of the Sun is the likelihood of contracting a disease you won't find almost anywhere else. Eighty percent of Arizona's reported cases of Valley Fever occur in Maricopa County, according to Dr. John Galgiani at the newly opened Valley...
June 15, 2012
Reported cases of valley fever by Tracy residents have risen more than 500 percent during the past three years, according to public health officials.
The highest level of the fungus in San Joaquin County can be predominately found around Tracy, said Dr. Karen Furst, health officer for the San...
August 3, 2007
"Hindsight is 20/20." Millions of people understand the reality of that saying as they learn they've lived with valley fever for weeks, months or even years before proper diagnosis.
More are learning to live with it every day, because valley fever is at epidemic levels across the...
January 7, 2002
Q. What's the best treatment for valley fever?
A. Valley fever is an infection - usually of the lungs - caused by a fungus, Coccidioides immitis, found in the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. It was discovered in the San Joaquin Valley of California and is also...
February 11, 1996
They will probably never make the bestseller list, nor star in films featuring Dustin Hoffman, Bruce Willis or monkeys.
Nonetheless, fungi -- the kingdom of organisms that includes molds and yeast -- have been quietly positioning themselves as the newest threat to human health, and epidemiologists...
February 6, 1996
How can you tell if a fungus is having sex?
Until now, the answer to this rather arcane scientific riddle has been: not very easily.
Now a team of researchers, borrowing techniques from diverse fields to study the fungus that each year gives thousands of people valley fever, say they have found...
February 24, 1994
To the woes of the victims of the Northridge earthquake, add pestilence.
In the month since the Jan. 17 quake shook the San Fernando Valley and much of the rest of the Los Angeles area, at least three dozen people in this part of California have become ill from what doctors say is an unusual...
November 27, 1981
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — In December 1977, a sudden wind erupted in the parched San Joaquin Valley of central California and, in one of the rare fireworks of nature that families speak about for generations, it whipped up clouds of dust that rolled like enormous opaque waves for hundreds of...
October 2, 1979
A freak windstorm over the southern end of California's San Joaquin Valley two years ago has been implicated in an unusual sharp increase in cases of the fungus disease coccidiodomycosis last year as far as 400 miles farther north. New cases appeared in areas where the illness has been...