MJP –
People at a California festival were so engrossed in their celebrations that they danced in the dust, unknowingly spreading a deadly fungus.
At least five people at the Buena Vista “Lightning in a Bottle” music festival contracted the soil infection while it was floating through the air.
‘Valley fever,’ a sickness unique to the southern San Joaquin Valley caused by two species of Coccidioides fungi that grow in mud and soil as mold, was so severe that three people had to be hospitalized due to their symptoms.
There may be an increase in unrecognized cases related to the festival, according to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH).
More than twenty thousand revelers flocked to Kern County’s Buena Vista Lake in May for the annual celebration.
In most situations, inhaling spores from this fungus does not cause Valley fever. However, in sporadic instances, the pathogen can infect the lungs, resulting in lethargy, fever, difficulty breathing, and even blood in the coughing fits.
There was a substantial rise in mortality among the 190 Californians diagnosed with a cocci infection in 2019; this illness can manifest in the skin, bones, or the brain.
“Past outbreaks of Valley fever have been associated with exposure to dust and dirt at outdoor events and job sites where dirt was being disturbed in areas of California where Valley fever is common,” according to CDPH authorities.
Fortunately, the Coccidioides fungus is not capable of transmitting Valley fever from one host to another. Nevertheless, the number of cases climbed 400% from 1998 to 2015.
There was an 800% increase in the number of reported cases of Valley fever in California between 2000 and 2022.
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These increasing occurrences were associated with a doubling of dust storms in the southwest, according to a 2017 report released by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“I cannot think of any other infection that is so closely entwined with climate change,” stated Rasha Kuran, an immunologist from the University of California, in an interview with The Washington Post in 2023.
In 2024, a month after the “Lightning in a Bottle” music festival, Kern County experienced its driest June in the past 130 years. This came on the back of massive historic rainstorms, which caused widespread flooding in the region.
Such a wet winter, experts explain, can encourage the growth of mold, and its spores. Then, when the weather dries out, these spores are unlocked from the soggy soil and kicked up into the air with the dust.
The event at Kern County in May ran over Memorial Day weekend, the perfect time for cocci spores to spread.
In some videos from the festival on social media, crowds can be seen covered in what appears to be a haze of dust. One account on TikTok described the event as a “dusty magical journey”.
Festival goers were warned of high winds and dust storms, but not of the invisible threat that the fine particles can deliver to the lungs.
“California probably spends around a billion dollars a year taking care of patients with Valley Fever and disseminated disease,” says infectious disease specialist Manish Butte from the University of California, Los Angeles.
“But the treatments today resemble those developed in the 1990s, and we still don’t have a good idea which patients will get sick and which ones will have milder disease.”
Some researchers fear that more droughts and floods in the future could make Valley fever endemic to nearly the whole West Coast. About a decade ago, Washington state got its first case – a long march north from the San Joaquin Valley where the disease got its name.
The outbreak of Valley fever at the “Lightning in a Bottle” music festival is an omen of illnesses to come.
