'They're not going to live normally': A devastating disease has surged in Calif.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

NEWS | BAY AREA & STATE
'They're not going to live normally': A devastating disease has surged in Calif.

By Gillian Mohney,
News Editor
Aug 18, 2025


Valley fever, or coccidioidomycosis, is spread when spores from a naturally occurring fungus are inhaled.
The Washington Post/Getty Images

In just 25 years, cases of an uncommon but potentially devastating disease have climbed more than 1,200% in California. … This month, the California Department of Public Health reported that Valley fever cases are on track to surpass last year’s record number of over 12,500 cases.



Muted backlit silhouette of two tractors raking soil in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
Getty Images/iStockphoto

The infection, caused when people inhale spores of the naturally occurring Coccidioides fungus, made up fewer than 1,000 cases back in 2000 in California.
Shaun Yang, the director for molecular microbiology and pathogen genomics at the UCLA Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, said relatively mild and wet winters in much of California mean the fungus can thrive underground without being killed off by frost. … “This kind of very wet and dry pattern definitely is perfect for this fungus to grow,” Yang told SFGATE.

In recent years, climate change has supercharged years of drought and rainfall in California, and Yang says these changes may be a big reason for the spike in cases. In dry weather, the spores spread as dry dust and soil are kicked up because of construction, agriculture or wind.

“I think climate change is the main reason to explain this type of dramatic explosion,” Yang told SFGATE. “I don’t think anything else can explain this type of phenomenon.”

{snip}

[Maninacan]

1. Valley Fever

I know someone that had it and might still. Doctors won't help You with it in the Eastern part of the states.

[Hekate]

3. I have an old friend who has part of his lung scarred from having it when young...

Eventually he may have to have surgery to have part of his lung removed — but mind you, he was in his early 20s when he got sick and then got better, and this is now almost 60 years on.

Having never had it myself (thank God) I don’t know what the medical protocol is, but you could find out by googling some major medical centers like Mayo. But saying “doctors won’t help you with it in the Eastern part of the States” just sounds a bit weird.

Best of luck.

[StarryNite]

6. A lot of doctors from other parts of the country

aren't even aware of Valley Fever. Sometimes people have to really push to get answers and tests that are needed to get those answers.

[Hekate]

9. That makes sense. I wasn't sure exactly what that poster was trying to convey.

[StarryNite]

2. This is a horrible disease for some people and dogs too.

Here in the Phoenix area we are well aware of it and what it can do. Dogs are particularly susceptible to getting it. It can be deadly. The medication for it is costly and has side effects. In dogs it can affect all different parts of the body including the limbs, brain, and other organs.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. My mother was diagnosed with Valley Fever, encapsulated,

meaning (if I have this correctly) she had lumps in her lung (and only one lung) which were Valley Fever. About a third or more of one lung was removed and she lived to age 82, some three decades later. Before this she smoked, and she stopped immediately with this. Good for her.

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. For decades after reading The Sheep Look Up, I found the daily headlines seemed to be drawn from the book

Then, years later, I read an interview of John Brunner, in which he said that there was only one thing in the book which was original,; everything else he had gotten from scientific journals, and a tour of major cities of the US.

There’s nothing in it about "The Greenhouse Effect" that I recall, but, it was written in 1972.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. John Brunner

In that case, you might want to start with his prior book, Stand on Zanzibar. It is frequently cited as his masterpiece. Like Make Room! Make Room! its primary theme is overpopulation, whereas The Sheep Look Up, usually said to be its “sequel," is about environmental degradation.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190509-the-1968-sci-fi-that-spookily-predicted-today

The 1968 sci-fi that spookily predicted today
10 May 2019

…

Beware, Brunner wrote a good deal of “pulp.” (It’s not particularly bad, just not on the same level.) I read an interview with him once where he was asked about that, and he said something like, “The good books take a lot of time to research and write. — In the meantime, I have a family to feed."

[OKIsItJustMe]

12. Thank You!

I have wondered about “Our World in Data.” One of the things which is a personal gripe of mine is that frequently their data is not current (i.e. it is a few years old.)

I am familiar with some of the authors you cited, but not all.

Regarding overpopulation, you may be interested in this Peanuts comic strip from 1957:

Or this one from 1959:


To put things into perspective, what was the world population at the time?

[OKIsItJustMe]

14. Infant mortality rates

Last edited Thu Aug 21, 2025, 04:32 PM - Edit history (1)

…

It was shockingly irresponsible to not couple basic family planning education as part of a public health policy when infant mortality rates fell. That’s not coercion or propaganda.

All it is is a suggestion to put thought into serious decisions over invading your neighbors’ lives and spaces and then blaming them.

…

There are a few factors which reliably lead to smaller families:

• ”Empowering” women: When women have a choice, not just about abortion, but about pregnancy in general, they tend to have fewer children.
• Better health care: When people are reasonably confident that their children will live to adulthood, they tend to have fewer children.
• Better education. More educated people tend to have fewer children. — This is the underlying social dynamic of The Marching Morons.

"Modern medicine” is a significant contributor to population growth, not just because of a decrease in infant mortality, but also because of an increase in "life expectancy" in general. All other things being equal, as it becomes “normal” for people to live longer, the population will grow.

Without a doubt, a growing human population, especially in the so-called “developed” countries has helped feed this crisis. On the other hand, in retrospect, signs of climate change date back to a time when the world population was much smaller. While we might reasonably say today that the population is far too large, no amount of “family planning” will have a significant impact on the level of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere or the amount of plastic pollution already in the ecosystem.




Figure from: van Vuuren, D.P., Doelman, J.C., Schmidt Tagomori, I. et al. Exploring pathways for world development within planetary boundaries. Nature 641, 910–916 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08928-w

[OKIsItJustMe]

16. OK, there's a lot there, much of which I followed and generally agree with

I can’t say I’d encountered the “data as oil” concept before, but I understand it. For my own part, I have done my level best to keep my data mine, however, I know too much about databases, and I realize that corporations are not as careful with my data as I am.

“Eminent domain” is a legal tool which can be used for valid reasons. However, it can be and is abused. It seems now, more than ever.

For me, our #1 priority must be restoration of the ecosystem. #2 (selfishly) is survival of my/our species. On the whole, I think we’ve accomplished a number of worthwhile things. We’re not all Beethoven , Rembrandt or Leonardo, but a few of us are. We’ve done a lot of damage to our ecosystem, exploited one another, and our fellow inhabitants. I fear we have signed “Gaia’s" death warrant. This saddens me. We don’t yet know of life elsewhere on other planets. Gaia may be unique.

We were warned decades ago of the likely consequences of our actions. We selfishly chose to ignore them. The impression I get is that by-and-large, we still choose to ignore them, even as they begin to play out around us (perhaps because they are simply too awful for us to acknowledge.)

I used to say, “It’s never too late to make life a little less miserable for future generations.” I’ve begun to question that. Perhaps I was too optimistic.

My point regarding “family planning” is not that it’s a bad thing, however, while the Earth’s population likely should have been kept at a fraction of what it now is, we need to make a dramatic change in a matter of years, not decades. Using a very simplistic model, if everyone stopped having children today, we might expect the Earth’s population to be cut in half in say… 40 years (that’s just not fast enough.) If those remaining people keep producing carbon emissions at the same rate “per capita” as today, that would be too much.

If we used a more realistic plan (like China’s now abandoned "one child policy”) we would expect the population to decline even less rapidly.

So, while better family planning would have been good 70 or 80 years ago, I’m afraid it is not the solution to our current crises.

[OKIsItJustMe]

18. I don't think we really disagree on all that much

Yes, "family planning" is a good thing (it would have been a better thing in the “post-war era”) it simply is not sufficient to address the crises we face (as many seem to believe it is.)

There is no one solution, if “we” are to survive, it will require several orchestrated solutions.