Why the valley fever is linked to climate change

As our planet is increasingly heated, we are seeing in real time the myriad of ways in which our climate is changing: unbearably hot summers, extreme cold photos and more dangerous natural disasters. And when our environment changes, we also, especially with regard to our health.

Valley Fever, a fungal disease that invades our lungs, is one of these public health concerns not so obvious. It is projected that the fungus, which is generally present in the west of the United States, will extend to new borders throughout the country, my former colleague Keren Landman reported in 2023.

So we knew that climate change had played some type of paper. Now, more evidence is coming about this imminent threat to public health. Last week, The Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) published a brief aimed at practicing doctors That led home how careless the fever of the valley can be, and by power, other diseases like this.

According to the report, the California Department of Public Health registered more than 9,000 cases of Valley Fever in 2023, the largest number of registered cases registered. That same yearCalifornia had multiple storms that soaked the State over the course of a few weeks, after a long period of drought from 2020. These conditions, long extremely dry climate spells followed by heavy rains, are fair for the growth of fever from the valley and in turn, infections.

He First recorded case From the Valley fever dates back to the 1890s. For some people, it is totally asymptomatic. But for others, valley fever can cause symptoms for weeks or months. And then there are the unfortunate few whose infection travels outside the lungs to the skin, bones or brain. Severe cases can change life and even fatal.

According to the report, the valley fever is quite subdiagnosed: cases can be up to 10 to 18 times more than 10,000 to 20,000 cases reported to the CDC annually. Doctors can lose signs because symptoms They are similar to other respiratory infections: cough, fever, feel tired. That ends up delaying treatment for people who end up really needing it.

“There are some people who obtain really weakening forms of this disease, where they are in life treatment. They enter and leave the hospital, ”said Pamela Lee, a doctor of infectious diseases at the Harbor-Ucl Medical Center and one of the authors of the Valley report. “And one of the things that worries me is that sometimes people can almost rule out this disease.”

Climate change is doing more than simply making the days hotter or the most extreme climate. It is changing how pre -existing diseases are produced and spread, and increasing the burden of healthy communities and institutions often little prepared. In addition to the valley fever, we are seeing the exacerbation of Damine algae flowers In places like Florida, the spread of mosquitoes that carry malaria and dengue in non -endemic areas, and hot days that exacerbate the inequalities of air pollution already prevailing in eastern North Carolina.

In spite of the increasingly important one that this intersection is becoming between climate change, disease and health, there are still challenges, from the scientific to the political, when doing an investigation that unravels these connections. It is not enough to observe these new risks. Quantify the impacts on the health of careless diseases and public health outbreaks that are attributable to climate change is essential to understand how we adapt and the scale of imminent risks that are coming.

“I think this is another of those types of things that we must think of as a prevalent and chronic threat that will be more risky for some more than others, but that nobody is totally free of risk,” said Daniel Swain, co -author of The Brief and Future Perfect 50 homenoree.

Coccidioides, the fungus that causes fever of the valley, lives on the floor of Arid states. Once the fungal spores on the floor are dispersed in the air, often by the wind or human activities Like construction and agriculture projects, only a few spores are needed to infect.

But what is promoting the growth of coccidiooids is an era of climate whip: a rapid change from one extreme climate to another. In the case of fungal spores that cause fever of the valley, changes in an extremely dry to extremely humid climate are the perfect conditions for coccidoidoids to prosper.

“Actually, it is not enough to be dry all the time, or the fungus would never grow. Nor is it enough to make it wet all the time, or never spray, ”says Swain. “It really requires that there be these transitions between humid and dry states in some way.”

People with works that interrupt the ground at the hot points of the Valley Fever It can have an increased risk of infectedas construction workers and agricultural workers. These workers also tend to have challenges to access medical care, leaving them likely to give up a diagnosis and, if necessary, treatment.

“These are the types of patients that I see all the time where to go to the doctor takes away an entire income day, and they can’t afford that,” Lee told Vox.

But as our climate changes, researchers expect to see more than an increase in the number of cases: they predict that infections will also jump beyond their current geographical borders. Valley fever probably spread To Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and Las Dakotas in the next 75 years. It is a public health problem that crosses the borders where it has not done before. “This is an example of something that we were 100 percent safe that has existed for a long time, but it has a much greater public health burden than the one used and is probably expanding to new regions,” Swain said.

The propagation of the valley fever also imposes a financial cost. A study found that the economic load Associated with the valley fever in response to climate change could be $ 18.5 billion a year in 2090, from direct costs such as hospitalization to indirect costs such as loss of income. Yes, tens of billions of dollars a year of a single disease.

Valley fever is just a singular disease. Now, imagine the total and economic number of a heating planet that exacerbates the spread of other diseases and public health crises. It is clearly a massive crisis, but one that researchers are still trying to quantify.

Unhealthy planet, unhealthy people

It is clear that our changing climate is having some kind of impact on human health. But exactly how climate change is playing a role, and to what extent it is promoting infections and deaths, researchers are still being discovered.

Colin Carlson, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Faculty of Public Health of Yale, says that there are diseases that researchers know that they are sensitive to climate, but they still do not lack observational epidemiological studies to show more specifically how climate change is attributable to the burden of these diseases.

“There are a lot of literature about weather and health,” Carlson told Vox. “There is not so much literature about the weather change and health “.

Carlson maintains a study database compiled by this specific literature called Health Attribution Library. Documents in this database quantify the impacts of human health (such as deaths, injuries or infections) of climate change caused by humans. Dengue, malaria, heat deaths and deaths related to fire by air pollution have attribution studies, while other diseases such as cholera, yellow fever and the western Nile virus have not done so. Beyond infectious diseases, public health concerns such as peaks in depression and anxiety can also be attributed to climate change.

“We know that there is a huge and strong relationship between temperature and suicides, but we don’t have a global estimate of how many suicides attributable to temperature, or how many are attributable to climate change,” says Carlson.

Part of the issue of studying health attribution is that, ultimately, it is difficult to do. A great challenge that researchers are is to lack long -term data on a large scale. Carlson added that his laboratory did an attribution study on malaria because there was data to work.

Of course, there are challenges beyond the scientific. The latest policies and actions of the Trump administration are not a good omen during the next four years of progress in climate and public health, nationwide and abroad.

“I think that the intersection of climate change and public health is particularly worrying because both seem to be partisan ideological objectives at this time, specifically, individually,” says Swain. “Together, they represent a great threat to the welfare of the health and economy of the United States.”

Although many uncertainties are carried out in the future of climate and public health research, and in turn, the future of human health, Carlson adds that attractive studies can be a point of progress for people whose lives will be harmed by the Climate change

“These attribution studies are incredibly useful in legal environments, because they can demonstrate that the plaintiffs have a basis for their damages,” he said. “When climate litigation has been successful, it has often been thoroughly.”

People in the health space, such as doctors and epidemiologists, can also focus on communicating the risks of climate change in human health to other doctors, patients and communities, as did the authors of the Valley fever report .

“We cannot have healthy humans on an unhealthy planet,” says Lee. “What we do, what we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, these things affect our health.”