|
deucedbi9
Stranger


Registered: 10/24/06
Posts: 4,636
Loc: UK
|
Valley fever
#18569929 - 07/17/13 04:00 AM (10 years, 9 months ago) |
|
|
I'm surprised I've not read of this before on the shroomery considering the number of members that must live in the South west of the US. It sounds like the equivalent of Cordyceps for Humans, except, thankfully, it doesn't fruit out of the head of the infected.
If you watch the video in the news article though you will see it is a horrible illness.
"Described by the Centers for Disease Control as a silent epidemic, 22,401 new infections were recorded across the US in 2011, mostly in the south-west, up tenfold from 1998. Although two-thirds of those infected suffer no symptoms, and the illness is not contagious, about 160 people die each year when the fungus spreads beyond the lungs to the brain." link
More info from the 'Centers for Disease Control and Prevention' >
"Valley fever is caused by Coccidioides, a fungus that lives in soil in the southwestern United States and parts of Mexico, Central America, and South America. Inhaling the airborne fungal spores can cause an infection called coccidioidomycosis, which is also known as “cocci” or “valley fever.”
Link
Please move if not appropriate to this forum.
-------------------- whether low pressure sucks or high pressure blows... it's a bugger to cycle in. even though I'm feeling good Something tells me I'd better activate my prayer capsule
|
BlackWidow


Registered: 09/25/11
Posts: 2,395
|
|
Valley fever is a nasty disease.
|
matsc
Stranger



Registered: 09/17/12
Posts: 681
Loc: Arizona
Last seen: 6 months, 26 days
|
|
My Lab director runs one of the Valley Fever labs here in Tucson. Even here, in one of its hottest infection areas, very little is known about the disease by most people. Its a boogie man sort of illness, where you always know a friend of a friend who had it, with symptoms that range from terrible to horrific.
My lab partner is working with a gene that in Cocci might actually be able to generate an attenuated form for vaccination. The big lab also does a lot of work with an orphan drug the school bought a few years back that shows a lot of promise as a viable treatment (Nikkomycin Z).
Unfortunately there is very little money for small scale regional diseases, even those as nasty as cocci. Nikk Z sat on the shelf for years before we managed to buy the license for it, and even now its not exactly like grant money is flooding in.
That said its actually a very interesting fungi. It lives quite happily in the soil as a filamentous, mold like growth. Certain triggers allow its hyphae to break up into individual cells (arthroconidia) which get stirred up into the air during dust storms or construction work. If these find a warm moist environment at 37C (such as a human respiratory track) they start to grow in a yeast form (single celled growth). These then form spherules, forming internal segmentations and generating endospores. Eventually the spherule breaks open and the spores spread. In 95+% of people nothing happens, you might show symptoms that look a bit like a bad case of allergies, maybe a mild flu. In others, its a case of life long misery.
That said, last year it was pulled off homeland securities "Select Agent" list so at least now the regulations for working on it are a little bit lighter. Its still BSL3, but the paperwork is less phonebook sized now.
-------------------- My Trade List!
|
nooneman


Registered: 04/24/09
Posts: 14,714
Loc: Utah
|
|
I wonder whether or not standard antifungal medications would work for it. It sounds dangerous, but I haven't heard anything about treatment despite there being a large number of drugs for treating fungal infections.
Beyond that, I wonder why it is suddenly popping up now. It seems a little odd to me. Normally, trich is dominant in soil, but even when it's not, soil is filled with so many different things that it's hard for any single thing to get much of a foothold. I wonder what's changed in the environment to suddenly favor this particular fungus. I bet that you could treat areas of land that are infected with it by introducing things like trich.
It's strange that the immune system doesn't fight it more vigorously. Maybe like cordyceps it produces some chemical that lowers the immune system or provides it some protection from the immune system. It could be producing a novel immunosuppressant which may be worth researching.
As an amateur armchair mycologist, I wonder about alternative methods of treating it. If it prefers 98 degrees, it might grow very poorly at temperatures in the 70s. If you could lower the temperature of the respiratory tract into the 70s, the immune system might have a much easier time fighting it off. Beyond that, lowering the temperature into the 70s would favor other bacteria and fungi in the respiratory tract providing it with some competition, perhaps enough to keep it from getting worse. A body temperature in the 70s is considered severe hypothermia, but you might only need to bring the respiratory tract into the 70s or less.
If you made someone who was infected breath air that was well below freezing, and had absolutely no humidity, I bet it would completely fuck any of this stuff growing in the respiratory tract.
Alternatively, if you wanted to live a little more dangerously, you could purposefully infect someone with a competing fungus (or several) in an attempt to slow it's growth, but that's pretty severe and might not even work.
Edited by nooneman (07/17/13 04:46 PM)
|
matsc
Stranger



Registered: 09/17/12
Posts: 681
Loc: Arizona
Last seen: 6 months, 26 days
|
Re: Valley fever [Re: nooneman]
#18572361 - 07/17/13 04:59 PM (10 years, 9 months ago) |
|
|
Quote:
nooneman said: I wonder whether or not standard antifungal medications would work for it. It sounds dangerous, but I haven't heard anything about treatment despite there being a large number of drugs for treating fungal infections.
Beyond that, I wonder why it is suddenly popping up now. It seems a little odd to me. Normally, trich is dominant in soil, but even when it's not, soil is filled with so many different things that it's hard for any single thing to get much of a foothold. I wonder what's changed in the environment to suddenly favor this particular fungus. I bet that you could treat areas of land that are infected with it by introducing things like trich.
It's strange that the immune system doesn't fight it more vigorously. Maybe like cordyceps it produces some chemical that lowers the immune system or provides it some protection from the immune system. It could be producing a novel immunosuppressant which may be worth researching.
As an amateur armchair mycologist, I wonder about alternative methods of treating it. If it prefers 98 degrees, it might grow very poorly at temperatures in the 70s. If you could lower the temperature of the respiratory tract into the 70s, the immune system might have a much easier time fighting it off. Beyond that, lowering the temperature into the 70s would favor other bacteria and fungi in the respiratory tract providing it with some competition, perhaps enough to keep it from getting worse. A body temperature in the 70s is considered severe hypothermia, but you might only need to bring the respiratory tract into the 70s or less.
If you made someone who was infected breath air that was well below freezing, and had absolutely no humidity, I bet it would completely fuck any of this stuff growing in the respiratory tract.
Alternatively, if you wanted to live a little more dangerously, you could purposefully infect someone with a competing fungus (or several) in an attempt to slow it's growth, but that's pretty severe and might not even work.
Thats just it, in the vast majority of cases, it is entirely self limiting. Only about 40% of cases show any symptoms at all, and of those more than 95% have nothing worse than a runny nose and perhaps a bit of coughing. The immune system recognizes and removes it without trouble. But in a very small percentage of cases it just takes hold and causes havoc.
As for antifungals, unfortunately, most systemic antifungals are quite nasty. Killing athletes foot or a yeast infection is relatively simple as the drugs need not be absorbed by the body. As eukaryotes, fungi have most of the same cellular machinery as humans, so we cannot use the same strategies as when fighting bacteria. Even the pathways we can target tend to have human analogues which can lead to very unpleasant side effects (see Amphotericin B).
The drug my school works with is a chitin synthase inhibitor. It shows real promise in slowing fungal growth, and turns what would normally be lethal doses of spores into minor infections in animal models.
As for the "recently" thing, well, its not. There are cases on record as far back as 1919 to illnesses that we now recognize as cocci. The thing is we now recognize it a great deal more. The housing boom of the last decade lead to a great deal of land development in the area, which put a lot of dust into the air for extended periods of time, leading to spikes in cases. Doctors are a bit better at recognizing, and reporting, cases, which makes the numbers appear larger. But mostly its because people like my PI and the other lab workers put a huge amount of PR work into getting the information out to people. They fight tooth and nail to get the word out that this disease is a real issue, and while it may only effect a tiny portion of the planet we are worth research funding too...
-------------------- My Trade List!
|
Gorlax



Registered: 05/06/08
Posts: 6,698
Last seen: 7 days, 14 hours
|
Re: Valley fever [Re: matsc]
#18572673 - 07/17/13 06:26 PM (10 years, 9 months ago) |
|
|
I think it's only deadly if your elderly, child, or sick. I'm in Az and we have a storm coming through right now. which is what causes this shit, blowing up all the dirt and what not. What i heard is that if you've lived here for a while you have probably already have had it and just thought it was the flu. We had a microburst yesterday and I got a bunch of dirt all up in my airways, kinda had a sore throat this morning but that was probably from all the wax i smoked that night. I have to be immune to it by now after living here almost my entire life and growing up playing in dirt
|
|