When Nora Bruhn bought admission to the Lightning in a Bottle arts and music festival on the shores of Kern County’s Buena Vista Lake earlier this spring, her ticket never mentioned she might end up with a fungus growing in her lungs.
After weeks of night sweats, “heaviness and a heat” in her left lung, a cough that wouldn’t quit and a painful rash on her legs, her physician brother said she might have valley fever, a potentially deadly disease caused by a dust-loving fungus that lives in the soils of the San Joaquin Valley.
Bruhn said she hadn’t been warned beforehand that Kern County and Buena Vista Lake are endemic for coccidioides — the fungus that causes the disease.
“If there had been a warning that there’s a potentially lethal fungal entity in the soil, there’s no way I would have gone,” said the San Francisco-based artist. “Honestly, I would have just been paranoid to breathe the whole entire time I was there.”
The incidence and range of valley fever has grown dramatically over the last two decades, and some experts warn that the fungus is growing increasingly resistant to drugs — a phenomenon they say is due to the spraying of antifungal agents on area crops.