Brynn Carrigan’s headaches started in April 2024. Within a couple of weeks, she was debilitated.
Her vomiting exacerbated the excruciating pain in her skull. She spent nearly every hour in bed with the covers pulled over her head, blocking out any sliver of light. Even the clock on her microwave was too much.
“I went from training for a marathon, raising two teenagers and having a job to essentially being bedridden,” said Carrigan, 41, of Bakersfield, California, who works for Kern County Public Health.
Her condition continued to get worse and doctors couldn’t provide answers — until her third visit to the hospital, when one doctor asked her if she’d had any respiratory symptoms before the headaches started.
She had. About a month before the headaches started, Carrigan had what she thought was a typical cold — though she recalled that her cough lingered a bit longer than normal and she went on to develop a rash on her thighs. Both symptoms got better without treatment.
These turned out to be key pieces of information. A biopsy of her spinal fluid revealed that Carrigan had coccidioidal meningitis, a rare complication of a fungal infection called Valley fever.
“I knew something was wrong but never in a million years did I think it would be something so serious,” Carrigan said.
Valley fever, or coccidioidomycosis, is caused by inhaling coccidioides spores, a type of fungi endemic to the hot, dry climate of the southwestern United States. Climate change is creating drier soils that are inching farther east, expanding the range of the fungi. Valley fever is increasingly being diagnosed outside its usual territory and cases have been rising across the Western U.S. While Arizona still sees the highest number each year, California is closing the gap.
From 2000 through 2016, California had 1,500 to 5,500 cases a year. From 2017 through 2023, those numbers jumped to 7,700 to 9,000 annual cases. Prelimin data for 2024 puts the count at more than 12,600 — the highest the state has ever seen and about 3,000 more cases than the previous record, in 2023.