A national epicenter for Valley fever infections, Arizona gets first major state funding boost in 15 years
"Researchers from Arizona’s three state universities will get $3.1 million to pinpoint hotspots and infection patterns for Valley fever, providing new tools to combat the fungal disease that sickens more people in Arizona than in any other state.
The three-year grant, awarded to the Valley Fever Collaborative by the Arizona Board of Regents, represents the largest state investment targeting the respiratory disease in recent Arizona history. It comes six months after a series of AZCIR reports highlighted the difficulty of tracking and preventing Valley fever infections, and exposed how a dearth of dedicated state funding has limited public understanding about the ecology and true impact of the dust-borne pathogen.
“We know Arizona is responsible for two-thirds of all U.S. Valley fever infections, but just looking across the land, we can’t tell which places the the fungus grows or are the source of so many infections,” Dr. John Galgiani, director of the University of Arizona College of Medicine’s Valley Fever Center for Excellence in Tucson, said in a statement.
“This study will try to connect the dots between strains that cause people to get sick, where in the land they come from, and what it is about those hotspots that makes the fungus thrive. With this new information, we might prevent infections at work sites or even for everyone who lives here.”
Valley fever, formally known as coccidioidomycosis, is caused by a fungus endemic to the Southwest that naturally occurs in soil. The fungal spores can easily become airborne when wind or activity from people or machines disturb the ground. Once inhaled, the spores infect the lungs, producing symptoms that can range from fatigue and cough to pneumonia. In rare cases, the disease can spread throughout the body, sometimes infecting the brain and spinal column...
Insufficient data collection and a lack of state and federal funding have long prevented the public from fully understanding the risks surrounding the disease, according to AZCIR’s previous reporting: Funding for Valley fever surveillance has appeared just once in the past 15 years as a $300,000 line item in the state health department budget, approved by the Arizona Legislature in 2007.
The $3.1 million ABOR award, which relies on Technology and Research Initiative Fund dollars, marks a “sea change in the idea of having state leadership at various levels see that this is an important project,” Galgiani told AZCIR.
“This is really, really different for the state of Arizona.”
On the environmental front, researchers will pair air and soil samples to identify fungus hotspots, work to determine the types of soil in which spores thrive, examine which conditions encourage the movement of those spores and more thoroughly investigate how airborne transmission works. . ."
AZCIR reporter Shaena Montanari contributed to this report.
This article first appeared on Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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