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By Heather Urquides
Arizona Daily Wildcat
September 16, 1996
It costs more than $168 million a year to treat and affects about 100,000 people a year.
It is a disease that is caused by a fungus, Coccidioidomycosis, and it is found in the soil.
In most cases, people do not even realize they have it. In mild cases, its symptoms resemble a cold and the body successfully fights the infection on its own.
But in severe cases, it can resemble pneumonia. It can spread to other organs in the body. When it spreads to the brain, it can be deadly.
The disease is Valley Fever, and 80 percent of the cases occur in Arizona.
That is why Dr. John Galgiani, of the Tucson Veteran Affairs Medical Center, and other UA researchers felt Arizona would be one of the best places to centralize and coordinate research and provide information on the prevalent Southwestern disease.
"It seems like this is a disease that really affects Arizonans," Galgiani said, "and it makes sense that there be a center that addresses this problem specifically right here at the U of A."
Although the center is not receiving funds from the UA directly, it has been supportive of the center, he said.
In late August, the Arizona Board of Regents approved Galgiani's research at the VA hospital as a center of excellence, although the approval brought no new funding. The center, part of the Arizona Research Laboratories at the UA, will focus on three area s.
It will look at the disease and its prevention, offer education and information on the disease, and will expand its clinical care with the cooperation of the VA Medical Center and the UA College of Medicine.
Galgiani was already doing research on the disease, as were other UA researchers, but with the new center, it will become more of a collaborated, centralized effort.
Marc Orbach, an assistant professor in plant pathology, said one of the main ideas in creating the center was that if basic and applied research were combined, more progress would be made than with some people working separately on different parts of the same problem.
The main focus at Orbach's lab is on the fungul pathogen of rice. It is related to Galgiani's work because researchers there are trying to understand the early developmental stages of a fungus.
These stages involve the time from when a fungus is actually inhaled and the different stages it undergoes as it infects the body.
These stages will help researchers determine why some people are able to resist infection to Valley Fever, while others are not, Orbach said.
One of the center's early achievements, Galgiani said, was successfully cloning a gene that encodes a protein researchers believe may be a protective antigen.
If they are right, Galgiani said they could be on their way to inventing a vaccine for the disease.
A Valley Fever telephone hotline, established in January, takes calls from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. It fields calls from physicians who have questions about the disease or treatments, and from people who just want information about the disease. The V alley Fever Center for Excellence Hotline number is 629-4777.
Galgiani said some of the calls to the hotline have been from people who were planning to move to Arizona but were concerned about the disease. Others had visited and came down with Valley Fever after they returned home.
Margaret Kurzius-Spencer, center coordinator, fields many of the calls that come to the hotline. In the six months since its establishment it has received 159 calls. The majority of the calls came from Arizonans, 13 percent came from Californians. Calls c ame in from 24 other states, as well from Italy, Switzerland and Canada.
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