Cases of valley fever are concentrated in an area where farms produce 2/3 of country's fruit and nuts and 1/3 of its vegetables. This story was produced in partnership with CivilEats, a nonprofit news organization focused on the American food system
Dr. Royce Johnson, director of the Valley Fever Institute and professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said 60 percent of valley fever cases are misinterpreted as the flu and go undiagnosed. Johnson, who has been working with valley fever patients for more than 40 years, says the remaining 40 percent tend to experience symptoms that are similar to and often confused with a serious case of pneumonia.
It’s not entirely clear just why that is. “I'm sure it’s related to whatever genetic resources those groups have compared to others,” he said. Another challenge with gathering data, said Carol Sipan, a public health lecturer at the University of California, Merced, is the fact that, “many [farmworkers] would go back to Mexico if they got really sick.” In Mexico, she added, valley fever is not a reportable disease.Like many farmworkers who contract the illness, Gutierrez found the cost of the antifungal medication needed to treat valley fever astounding.
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