Explosive Growth In Valley Fever In CA, AZ In 2024; Now Shitstain's Medical Cuts Damaging Efforts To Respond
Valley fever is endemic to southern Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Central and South America, but nowhere are cases of the disease more common than in Arizona. After Arizona started mandatory laboratory reporting for valley fever in 1997, registered cases ticked up and down. But the number began trending upward dramatically in 2016. Then, in 2024, cases in the state exploded, hitting their second-highest total ever. More than 15,000 infections were reported — a 37 percent increase over 2023. California, which runs just behind Arizona in its annual valley fever caseload, registered a record-breaking 12,637 cases in 2024, representing a 39 percent increase over the previous year, which had already smashed a record set in 2019.
Some portion of the rise in reported cases represents growing awareness among physicians and an associated surge in testing. The pace of new construction in untouched areas also plays a role. But the recent increase in cases has been so dramatic, Galgiani and other researchers across the West who study the fungus think another factor may be driving the trend: supersoaker winter monsoons followed by scorching summer heat and drought, a cycle made more intense by climate change.
Because warmer air holds more moisture, monsoons and other major rainfall events pull in larger quantities of water vapor and produce heavier downpours as the planet warms. This physical fact has fueled a spate of monster floods across the U.S. and around the world in recent years. But the same warmth can conversely lead to drought by making the atmosphere “thirstier,” or capable of absorbing more water from the land’s surface. Both conditions facilitate the spread of valley fever — the wetter conditions by encouraging growth of the spores, and the drier by facilitating desiccation and soil disturbance. “The main driver for us is certainly this very clear association for coccidioides between heavy precipitation cycles followed by drought,” said George Thompson, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine who specializes in fungal diseases.
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In late March, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, ordered deep cuts to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant programs for states across the country. Although Arizona’s attorney general challenged that decision alongside 19 other state attorneys general, the Supreme Court handed down a brief ruling in August permitting the lion’s share of those cuts to go through. The White House’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 would further weaken the state’s public health and research infrastructure: Arizona stands to lose an estimated $135 million annually in funding from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, for infectious disease research at universities and hospitals, according to an analysis by the Science and Community Impacts Mapping Project. These cuts won’t affect the Valley Fever Center for Excellence, which is funded primarily by philanthropic dollars and was established by the Arizona Board of Regents, not the federal government. But what’s happening at the federal level is destabilizing the network of people and institutions Galgiani relies on to keep the valley fever solutions machine running, including the public health departments he works with and his collaborators at universities in California, Arizona, and Texas.
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https://grist.org/health/valley-fever-arizona-fungus-climate-change/
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you start talking like a valley girl.
I can't even with these basic people, they're so lame.
Ugh, I'm literally dying for some avocado toast right now.
Like, oh my god, did you see her outfit? It's like totally tragic.
