A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West
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Re: A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West
#2Swell. I write this from the Sacramento area (yeah, "the other valley" - Central, not Silicon) as somebody who was born by Bakersfield.
OTOH - doesn't every place have its own local diseases and parasites???
Re: A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West
#3The problem also is that you have people who are constantly getting exposed to anti-fungal medications without their knowledge. E.g. almost all supermarket lemons/limes/oranges are coated in anti-fungal cream before being coated with another thin layer of wax, so when you make zest from them (or order a drink with zest at a bar) then you are probably reducing your body's ability to fight off things like this. So much better to avoid things like that entirely I think, as fungal infections are often not possible to cure.
Re: A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West
#4Also, a new coronovirus in France and the middle east, which although it's killed 50% of the people who've caught it so far is probably not going to kill us all[1].
Also H7N9 (a new bird flu), although it's a bit of a lightweight having killed a mere 20% of sufferers. It may not spread human to human, although we don't know that, and this one hasn't yet reached "the West".
Re: A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West
#5Well that article makes you feel horrifyingly hopeless.
Somewhat related I've read that people who visit other countries for weeks at a time can also get all kinds of illnesses their immune system isn't familiar with, like Americans visiting Japan for a few weeks can catch all kinds of stomach viruses.
Re: A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West
#6Swell. I write this from the Sacramento area (yeah, "the other valley" - Central, not Silicon) as somebody who was born by Bakersfield. OTOH - doesn't every place have its own local diseases and parasites???
>doesn't every place have its own local diseases and parasites?
Exactly. This whole article feels like the sort of ego piece you only get out of places like LA or NYC. Every place on earth has diseases and other medical problems caused by local environmental factors. To give it that a name like "valley fever" is to trivialize the fact that the exact same phenomenon occurs everywhere else in the world too.
Re: A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West
#7Swell. I write this from the Sacramento area (yeah, "the other valley" - Central, not Silicon) as somebody who was born by Bakersfield. OTOH - doesn't every place have its own local diseases and parasites???
>doesn't every place have its own local diseases and parasites???
You're right. I live in the mid-Atlantic region of the country. Two months ago, we went hiking in the woods and my wife and I forgot to check our three kids for ticks until the next day. My 4 year old son had two ticks on him. A week later, bulls-eye rash about 5 inches in diameter appeared on his back around one of the tick bites.
Three weeks of antibiotics later, he was fine but there are a lot of people that get Lyme's Disease without even knowing that they had a tick bite, or the rash that appears in the majority (but not all) is in their hairline so they don't see it. Untreated, it can have a lot of the same effects the article attributes to this fungal infection.
Re: A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West
#8The problem also is that you have people who are constantly getting exposed to anti-fungal medications without their knowledge. E.g. almost all supermarket lemons/limes/oranges are coated in anti-fungal cream before being coated with another thin layer of wax, so when you make zest from them (or order a drink with zest at a bar) then you are probably reducing your body's ability to fight off things like this. So much…
Do you have any more information about that?
I zest the peels often and enjoy a gin and tonic with lime, would buying organic or from a specific producer help avoid it? The cost should be minimal for these items.
Re: A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West
#9I am very closely acquainted with a person who was found to have this infection by culture of a biopsy sample during the 1980s. The person I know has never been to the parts of the United States mentioned in this article. The examination finding that prompted the biopsy was persistent cough and general fatigue accompanied by an abnormal chest X-ray. (The chest X-ray, in turn, was follow-up to a course of preventive treatment for tuberculosis, medically indicated for a foreign person who arrived in the United States Mantoux-positive for tuberculosis, perhaps from having had the BCG tuberculosis vaccine overseas. The X-ray finding was nothing at all like the chest X-ray of someone with a tuberculosis infection, but quite unusual, prompting many other diagnostic tests, including repeated biopsies.)
The good news is that the patient I know recovered fully after surgery. The bad news is that the patient had to have major surgery. Moreover, we are unsure to this day what the actual diagnosis was. The surgery was curative, as the patient's complaints and disabilities all went away after it was over, but the lung infection was never definitively diagnosed. (Another infectious agent was cultured after a different biopsy.) Slow-growing lung infections are very hard to diagnose. Fortunately, most people have a lot of spare lung tissue, so even removal of a whole lobe on one lung does not impair future aerobic exercise.
Developing better diagnostic procedures for this illness will not be easy at all, but seems well worth doing. Antifungal drugs are very hard to develop, because fungi are very biologically similar to animals, and thus a drug that works on fungi has a high probability of being toxic to human patients if taken internally.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/valley-fever/DS00695/DSECTI...
Re: A Disease Without a Cure Spreads Quietly in the West
#10Well that article makes you feel horrifyingly hopeless. Somewhat related I've read that people who visit other countries for weeks at a time can also get all kinds of illnesses their immune system isn't familiar with, like Americans visiting Japan for a few weeks can catch all kinds of stomach viruses.
That's true, but I picking up a few minor infections here and there that your body can shrug off is no big deal. In fact it's useful for our immune systems get a minor workout from time to time.