Valley fever has been around for more than 100 years, and disproportionately affects poor farmworkers. For some, it becomes a lifelong illness, and doctors don’t know why. The disease is caused by a mysterious fungus endemic to the dusty soils of California’s Central Valley. Symptoms range from mild fatigue to incapacitating, flesh-eating infections, and despite decades of research, very little is known as to how the fungus operates, making advances in treatment and the push to develop a vaccine painfully slow. Getting sick with valley fever can be as easy as driving through a city like Bakersfield with the windows down. In fact, people living in endemic areas are more likely to develop valley fever than the chickenpox. All it takes is breathing in a single spore. A third of all infections nationwide occur in California and rates are steadily increasing. This piece investigates the disease in Kern County, an area in the Central Valley where infections are the highest in the state. The NIH and the CDC finally took action to establish a clinical trial for disease research this year, with the hopes of starting work to establish a vaccine, yet many of the public health experts and doctors I’ve spoken to say that if valley fever were infecting techies in San Francisco or politicians in Washington, DC, the constant push for state and federal funding would be a non-issue.
