United States: According to the latest report, at least five “Lightning in a Bottle” music festival attendees in Buena Vista, California, contracted dangerous fungus illnesses.
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The reports said that three of them had severe symptoms, upon whose hospitalization they were declared to have been ill with ‘Valley fever.’
This disease is said to be endemic to the southern San Joaquin Valley and is generally caused by two species of Coccidioides fungi, which are produced in the soil as mold, as sciencealert.com reported.
Moreover, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) fears that the total count of those contacted at the festival has remained underdiagnosed.
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The festival was held at Buena Vista Lake in Kern County in May, attracted more than twenty thousand people.
While enjoying the event, most attendees breathed in spores from this serious fungus but did not develop valley fever.
In rare cases, this pathogen can affect the lungs, leading to fatigue or fever, making breathing difficult, and some patients cough up blood.
More about Valley fever
Those who come into contact with valley fever, also known as coccidioidomycosis or cocci, might be cured without treatment. However, the symptoms can last months or even years.
As the experts suggest, the infection spreads to the lungs and other parts of the body. As there is no cure, the risk of paralysis and death consistently linger in this case.
According to officials at the CDPH, “Past outbreaks of Valley fever have been associated with exposure to dust and dirt at outdoor events and job sites where dirt was being disturbed in areas of California where Valley fever is common,” as sciencealert.com reported.
Moreover, as the University of California immunologist Rasha Kuran reported by the Washington Post in 2023, “I cannot think of any other infection that is so closely entwined with climate change.”
The infectious disease specialist Manish Butte from the University of California, Los Angeles, stated, “California probably spends around a billion dollars a year taking care of patients with Valley Fever and disseminated disease,” as sciencealert.com reported.
“But the treatments today resemble those developed in the 1990s, and we still don’t have a good idea which patients will get sick and which ones will have milder disease,” he continued.