Valley Fever? Be Glad You Didn’t Get Histoplasmosis!!!



Histo clusters like a starry night

Valley Fever AKA Coccidiomycosis is a fungal disease found world-wide, but is endemic in the American Southwest. You get it by breathing in the spores from ground dust. It can be deadly or debilitating, but often goes undiagnosed. Bad breathing problems as lungs swell and squeeze the air out. With swollen lungs, breathing enough air in and out becomes difficult and anoxia results. Not a pretty picture.

Transition to a group of students and faculty from Thomas University returning from a field trip to Nicaragua which included visiting some abandoned silver mines with plenty of bats. A few of us got sick on the way home while others had a delay of a few days. A few didn’t get sick at all, damn them. Two nearly died, and the rest, 10 or so were sick in degrees. Sally and I were really hit hard. High fever, low blood oxygen, swollen lungs so we couldn’t breathe and coughing. The group became a study group for the CDC which was quickly called in to help diagnose and manage the outbreak. A savvy Doc in Thomasville  recognized the cluster of people getting sick and called for help. The Florida Department of Health and the Georgia Health Department also got brought in. We were all very sick puppies.

The CDC doctors knew it was either Coccidiomyciosis (valley fever) or Histoplasmosis but the symptoms are nearly or exactly the same. So they put us through many tests and finally concluded the disease we all had was Histoplasmosis.  Not good. No real treatment except “experimental” drugs that insurance doesn’t pay for, that don’t work all that well and have nasty side effects. The good news is that most people eventually get better, while some eventually die. In our case (Sally’s and mine) our immune system got the upper hand finally and we were left with many little nodules in our lungs, places where the fungus was walled in by health tissue and kept sequestered by the immune system. But we were warned: if your immune system gets reduced, you will probably have an outbreak that, along with whatever caused the immune system to fail, might just kill you.

So we group of hardy adventurers now carry the seeds of a real disaster in our lungs. Which leads me to the advice in the banner: Vally Fever? Better that than good old Histo. (Some of the participants of this adventure  will read this. Hopefully you are all still going strong. We are. But I will never forget the remark of the radiologist who read our chest x-rays: “Looks just like a starry night. See all those little white dots? That’s the bug!!!” He was thrilled. We were less so. )

Article on Valley Fever: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/05/13/181880987/cases-of-mysterious-valley-fever-rise-in-american-southwest?ft=3&f=1001&sc=nl&cc=nh-20130513
Image: https://pathwiki.pbworks.com/f/chest%20xray%20calicified%20densities.jpg