Simon Camponuri was conducting fieldwork in Central California’s Carrizo Plain National Monument around 2016, studying Giant Kangaroo rats and other endangered species with researchers from UC Berkeley. The team had hoped to examine the impacts of climate change on wildlife in the desert landscape after California’s 2012 to 2016 drought – one of the most severe in state history. But as the group trod around rodent burrows, they kicked up dust, unknowingly exposing themselves to Valley Fever.
Three researchers ended up contracting the dangerous lung infection. “That really made it clear that there was a part of the ecosystem that we weren’t really paying attention to,” Camponuri told The Independent last week. Camponuri, now a PhD candidate at Berkeley, UC San Diego associate professor Alexandra Heaney, and scientists at institutions across the country have since found that the spread of Valley Fever in California has links to climate change, and more people are appearing to be infected each year.
Their findings were recently published in the October issue of The Lancet Regional Health Americas . Valley Fever, officially called coccidioidomycosis , was first discovered in Southern California’s San Joaquin Valley . The lung infection is caused by a fungus that grows in soil in western parts of the US, with the majority of cases reported in California and Arizona.
While Camponuri’s colleagues recovered, as many as 10 percent of those infected will develop serious.