The City Where People Are Afraid To Breathe

HonorPoncaCityDotCom writes "BBC reports that cases of an incurable illness called valley fever are multiplying at an alarming and mystifying rate in the American south-west. Few places have been hit as hard as Avenal, a remote city of 14,000 people, nestling in a dip in the floor of the San Joaquin Valley in what experts refer to as a 'hot zone' for coccidioidomycosis — an illness caused by the inhalation of tiny fungal spores that usually reside in the soil. 'On windy days you are more conscious of it,' says Enrique Jimenez. 'You breathe in through your nose, and try not to breathe in as much dust. I worked in the fields for a long time, my father managed a few crops out here, and we took precautions, wearing bandanas.' Valley Fever is not easy to treat. Anti-fungal drugs are available for serious cases but some patients don't respond and it can take years to clear up. It never leaves the body and symptoms can be triggered again. Some patients are on the drugs for life, at a crippling financial cost. During World War II, German prisoners held at a camp in Arizona fell ill. Germany reportedly invoked the Geneva Convention to try to get them moved. Longstanding concerns about valley fever were heightened recently when a federal health official ordered the transfer of more than 3,000 exceptionally vulnerable inmates from two San Joaquin Valley prisons where several dozen have died of the disease in recent years. Dale Pulde, a motorcycle mechanic in Los Angeles County, said he contracted the disease three years ago after traveling to Bakersfield in Kern County and was coughing so hard he was blacking out; he spit blood and couldn't catch his breath. For two months, doctors tested him for everything from tuberculosis to cancer until blood tests confirmed he had the fever. 'When I found out that health officials knew about (this disease) and how common it is, I was beside myself,' said Pulde. 'Why don't they tell people?'"

Comments

hmm..

[DFurno2003]

BBC is the closest news network to cover it?

Re:hmm..

[Daemonik]

Of course the citizens are left to fend for themselves but the prisoners are evacuated in air conditioned buses.

The prisoners are the direct responsibility of the State and therefore the State is liable for their health and well being.

Re:hmm..

[Mike Frett]

American media are busy trying to inform you of the NSA being the good guys on their five-hour long morning show. Later, they want you to know about the upcoming season of Honey Boo Boo. After they tell you all this they want to show you some Commercials so you can buy a Laptop with Windows 8. After the break they want to have a sit-down with some self-proclaimed former attorney that will explain to you why the Jury was wrong about the Zimmerman verdict, they'll be sure to spend two whole hours with limited Commercial breaks on that fiasco.

Re:hmm..

[Your.Master]

It was 40 out of 8000 people that died. That's a 0.5% death toll in 7 years, which annualizes to 0.07%. That's way higher than most Flus (2009 was relatively deadly at 0.03%). And those Flus are worldwide averages, not localized to prisons in developed countries.

Moderators asleep at the job

[Sparticus789]

From the summary:

It never leaves the body and symptoms can be triggered again.

From the linked article

The infection ordinarily resolves leaving the patient with a specific immunity to re-infection.

Both cannot be true.

Re:Moderators asleep at the job

[asdfman2000]

There are multiple forms of infection. I recently got taken out by this for about a week and had to go on intense anti-fungal meds. Most people just get a minor rash and flu-like symptoms and it goes away on its own. Few even realize they had it.

There is a form that basically remains dormant in your system for the rest of your life, however it's rare and mostly only affects immunocompromised people.

Some people treat Valley Fever like some doomsday infection, and some sites like valleyfeversurvivor.org have communities of people acting like it's the source of all their health problems regardless of whether or not it's actually true.

Re:Moderators asleep at the job

[asdfman2000]

As another "infected person", valleyfeversurvivor.org Is filled with misinformation and fear-mongering. The community is filled with hypochondriacs blaming everything from smelly farts to tooth loss on the disease.

Valley fever is no more dangerous than the flu. Most people who get it recover on their own with no complications and sometimes without even realizing they had it. Rare cases result in long term problems or death, but again, those are extremely rare.

Talk to your doctor if you have questions.

Re:Moderators asleep at the job

[sexconker]

Shingles is a virus, Valley Fever is a fungus that gets inhaled. They are not the same.

So what? Both are obviously true despite your claim that they can't be. Virus vs. fungus has no bearing on it.

0) You can be infected with something.
1) You can fight it off and become immune to it.
2) You can later be reinfected by the remnants that still remain in your body - because the infectious agent has changed, because your immune system has failed/been overwhelmed, because your specific immunity has gone away, or because the mechanism of infection (or location in your body) is different (even if the infectious agent is unchanged).

Re:Valley fever

[CanHasDIY]

I, for one, would be pleased to see a reversal in the trend in the United States to imprison instead of rehabilitate those who are eminently rehabilitatable.

Not going to happen, so long as we have people making money from an industrial prison complex.

Potheads and repeat offenders are their bread-and-butter.

This thing is very common.

[Entropius]

I lived for a while in Tucson. Pretty much anyone who's outdoors in the desert much is likely to get it; in most people there are either no symptoms or flu-like symptoms. My PhD advisor had to have major surgery, and in the pre-surgery physical they found some characteristic scar tissue in his lungs and commented that he'd had valley fever at some point; he had no idea.

I'm pretty sure I had it; I got an unexplained very high fever and "flu-like" muscle pains along with a cough, but no sinus congestion at the end of my first year there.

Re:I expected China, but here in the US?

[gandhi_2]

Most of the medical professionals and vetrinarians in my area of southwest Utah know about it.

It's no secret.

People gotta live somewhere. Fires, floods, earthquakes, malaria, congressmen, natural radiation, natural heavy metals in ground water... every place has some problem.

It isn't like we are talking about bubonic plague running rampant. What should the government do? Spray bleach over everything? Kick people off their own property?

Don't worry, it's organic

[phantomfive]

Organic and natural things are good for you, right?

Re:Valley fever

[Sparticus789]

The real problem is not prison population. The real problem is that urban areas like Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco ship their prisoners to the Central Valley (more recently Arizona, Mississippi, and Oklahoma) because they do not want to pay for a prison in their own urban centers. Lower land costs, lower utility costs, and lower cost of living/labor makes the Central Valley a better place to house prisoners.

My father-in-law works at one of these Central Valley prisons, and I can tell you that his entire prison (3,000) does not fall within the category of rehabilitation. The entire prison is for people who were transferred from other prisons for murdering another prisoner or who were convicted of murder prior to being jailed. Not exactly the type of people that respond well to counseling and talk therapy. More like the kind of people that would stab you with a metal pen.

Why don't they tell??????

[jayteedee]

Why don't they tell people that the southwest is full of sharp plants???
Why don't they tell people that the southwest if HOT???
Why don't they tell people that "it's a dry heat"???
Because most southwesterners already KNOW, that's why. Few people have problems from valley fever(1 in 1000, or 1 in 5000 depending on source). And all the medical people will test for it first when a patient comes in experiencing a bad "fever". Even the people that have it (or have noticeable symptoms) usually can overcome it themselves without any medical treatment.

npr shots

[westlake]

BBC is the closest news network to cover it?

Cases Of Mysterious Valley Fever Rise In American Southwest [May 13]

Valley Fever Outbreaks Lead California to Move Inmates [July 5]

Re:I expected China, but here in the US?

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>Surprising. It's a "new low" in the US as far as I'm concerned. If an area is not safe for human habitation, it needs to be closed off. "Why don't they tell people?!"

It's no big secret. People who live there know about it. God alone knows why they live there. If you go to Avenal and look around, you can see 20+ really good reasons not to live there before you even think about Valley Fever.

Old saw still applies

[dkleinsc]

In undeveloped countries, don't drink the water. In developed countries, don't breathe the air.

My brother got a kidney in CA

[coyote_oww]

The list does not work the way you think it does. My brother had not been employed for several years, not a problem. Kidney transplants are money saving operations, so money is not really an obstacle. All kidney patients are eligible for Medicare, and the break-even of cost of transplanted patients vs dialysis is 2 years or less. So, generally the government is eager for you to get a kidney transplant because they are covering all or the bulk of your costs regardless of socio-economic status or voluntariness of your residence.

So... everyone goes on the list, and it's pretty much do first come, first serve, with exceptions for people who have some particular difficulty that might make a long wait impossible. Generally, loss of kidney function will not kill you directly, you can live a very long time on dialysis. My brother lived for several years with no kidneys at all (removed for extreme size).

Bad (medical) behavior can get you off the list (excessive drugs, alcohol, or obesity, for example), but money can be worked around.

Other organs do not have the same cost-benefit structure, and there are not alternative therapies, so the rules work differently.

I don't know what the rules are for sex changes, so I'm no help there.

Re:The City Where People Are Afraid To Breathe

[amorsen]

Most wind turbines actually do not use neodymium magnets. They use plain old electromagnetic generators. However, to electromagnetic generators get inefficient at low speeds, so using electromagnetic generators also means using gears, possibly multi-stage. Coal, gas, and nuclear plants generally work with very hot steam. You can design your steam turbine for pretty much any rotational speed you want. No gears necessary.

So why not just increase the rotational speed of wind turbines? You lose aerodynamic efficiency when the tip speed gets to a reasonable fraction of the speed of sound. To avoid gears and use electromagnetic generators on a typical 3MW wind turbine, you would need the tips to go faster than the speed of sound. Extracting power from the wind while going at supersonic speeds is a yet unsolved problem.

If the use of permanent magnets was banned entirely from wind turbines, the market would not really change much. Some manufacturers would temporarily lose market share while they redesigned, but overall turbine price would not change dramatically.