Valley fever infects more than 13,000 people annually in Arizona and California and kills more than 100. Yet the two states spend less on public awareness about the disease in one year than the Bakersfield City School District spends on lunch milk for a month and less than Pima County’s Parks and Recreation Department spent on janitorial supplies in 2016.
Government-funded awareness campaigns can transform public behavior and lead to different approaches by doctors and nurses. When it comes to valley fever, though, state and local agencies in both states have historically struggled with support for one of the most important aspects of combatting the disease: warning the public of its existence.
Since the beginning of 2011, valley fever — which is caused by breathing in coccidioidal fungal spores that get swept into the air — has infected more than 75,000 people in California and Arizona, the two regions with the highest number of cases. California experienced a valley fever epidemic last year and a wet winter signals that 2017 could be worse.
Instead of funding more valley fever awareness work, the California Department of Public Health this year has routed awareness funding to more high-profile diseases, like the zika virus, for which there have been fewer than 20 diagnoses in California this year, and sexually transmitted diseases. The state budget for valley fever awareness: zero.
California also has not provided valley fever awareness funding to county public health agencies in at least three decades. Arizona, the other state where valley fever is widespread, hasn’t done much better.
“It is a disease that is not respected and not funded,” said Pat White, who founded Arizona Victims of Valley Fever in Sun City West near Phoenix more than a decade ago. “People come here for a convention, they go home, get sick and they don’t know why.”
Under former Gov. Janet Napolitano, Arizona’s valley fever program received $300,000 in state money in 2007. The money went into an education video, an enhanced surveillance project and research at the University of Arizona’s Valley Fever Center for Excellence.
The surveillance identified costs of the disease as well as trends in duration and severity of illness and delays in diagnosis. It remains the largest population-based assessment of the effects of valley fever.
But with the onset of the recession, state valley fever funding disappeared in 2008. The Arizona Department of Health Services has relied on grants for its valley fever activities since 2010 and now operates on a $96,868 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant for surveillance and education. Since losing its state money, the program’s budget has never exceeded $100,000 per year.
“The recession came and we lost almost every single line item in the agency, including valley fever,” said Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association.
New research focus but no funds for awareness
The situation looked ripe for change after the first national symposium on valley fever. U.S. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, hosted the event in 2013, shortly after a yearlong reporting project on valley fever by the Center for Health Journalism Collaborative, called “Just One Breath,” put the issue on the map. The symposium brought together leading physicians, politicians and public health officials, including the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the CDC. And it promised to finally bring needed resources and attention to the disease.
“Everything in public health is a competing priority,” said Kirt Emery, a recently retired Kern County, California, epidemiologist who has spent much of his career focused on valley fever. “I’ve seen great changes since that symposium at the national level.”
McCarthy’s symposium was integral in securing $5 million for a clinical trial that launched last fall of fluconazole, a drug that has been used to treat valley fever off-label for years. The CDC also began investigating cocci cases far from traditionally endemic regions after the symposium.
The University of Arizona recently secured a $2.27 million, four-year federal grant from the National Institutes of Health to build a genetic profile of the people who get extremely ill from valley fever.
The symposium also resulted in the creation of the Congressional Valley Fever task force, aimed at improving awareness, reducing the risk of misdiagnoses and finding a viable cure.
“It took a handful of us, a lot of phones called and being really annoying because of some of the bureaucracy, but we’ve kicked loose some money, we’ve kicked loose some priority. We’re making progress,” said Republican Rep. David Schweikert of Scottsdale, a task force co-chair.
Yet those positive results on a federal level haven’t translated into public health information for communities.
There has been no broad public awareness campaign in California with highway billboards or posters in stores, as there have been for drunken driving or the annual flu vaccine. No public service announcements run on television or radio.
Instead, most valley fever campaigns rely on that mainstay of low-budget outreach: the pamphlet.
Launching efforts on a shoestring budget
California Public Health Department officials acknowledge the lack of funding, but say they have done their part by making available fact sheets, posters, brochures and educational materials on the agency website and sharing materials on social media and in professional newsletters.
But those sometimes obscure publications are likely not seen by people who are most vulnerable to the disease — those who work outdoors, especially in construction, farm labor and other jobs that bring them into contact with dirt and dust.
To address these risks, the state says it has worked with CalFIRE to educate wildland firefighters on the dangers of cocci while battling blazes in endemic regions and consulted with the High Speed Rail Authority on best practices for construction of the multi-billion-dollar bullet train that will cut through high-risk areas.
Arizona has also settled for a low-cost awareness effort, putting several public service announcements on its website with the same message: “Cough? Fever? Exhausted? Ask your doctor to test you for valley fever.”
“That’s way too passive,” said Madalene Milano, a partner at GMMB, an international communications firm behind the successful “Click it or Ticket” campaign to increase seatbelt use. “The sad thing is, a lot of times people will do a brochure or poster, or do a very static campaign, and that’s not how people live their lives now.”
Without special state funds, counties that are hardest hit have done their best to fill in the gap.
In Arizona, more than 50 libraries in Maricopa, Pima and Pinal counties have distributed valley fever educational brochures in English and Spanish. And public service video announcements ran for 27 days in Phoenix- and Tucson-area Harkins Theatres in 2014.
Such efforts are worthwhile, though they work better when sustained, said Dr. John Galgiani, director of the UA’s valley fever center. With more funding, public health officials could increase outreach efforts to doctors, pay for regular public service announcements on radio and TV and put up billboards along major highways, he said.
McCarthy said resources would be best spent in creating online awareness efforts. “The greatest place we can go is social media,” he said.
But online efforts have languished. It wasn’t until this month that the Congressional Valley Fever Task Force, founded in 2013, launched a website. And its Twitter and Facebook pages have fewer than 30 posts in two years.
