Los Angeles Times Some experts warn that the fungus that causes valley fever is growing increasingly resistant to drugs — a phenomenon they say is due to the spraying of antifungal agents on area crops.
In 2001, fewer than 1,500 Californians were diagnosed with valley fever. Last year, that number rose to more than 9,000.
When Nora Bruhn bought admission to the Lightning in a Bottle arts and music festival on the shores of Kern County’s Buena Vista Lake earlier this spring, her ticket never mentioned she might end up with a fungus growing in her lungs.
After weeks of night sweats, “heaviness and a heat” in her left lung, a cough that wouldn’t quit and a painful rash on her legs, her physician brother said she might have valley fever, a potentially deadly disease caused by a dust-loving fungus that lives in the soils of the San Joaquin Valley.
Bruhn said she hadn’t been warned beforehand that Kern County and Buena Vista Lake are endemic for coccidioides — the fungus that causes the disease.
“If there had been a warning that there’s a potentially lethal fungal entity in the soil, there’s no way I would have gone,” said the San Francisco-based artist. “Honestly, I would have just been paranoid to breathe the whole entire time I was there.”