Author(s): Evie Adams, Ammon Miles, Katrina Derieg, Eric Rickart
Mentor(s): Katharine Walter, Kevin Perry
Institution UTech
Climate change has been implicated in the emergence of several fungal diseases, including Valley fever (caused by Coccidioides), which is rapidly emerging in arid regions of the American West due to increasing cycles of precipitation and drought. Although Valley fever is a major cause of community-acquired pneumonia, where most people are infected with the Valley fever fungus and how infection risk will change with climate change is unknown, making it difficult to develop public health interventions to reduce infection risk. We expect there will be differences in infection risk depending on a variety of climate factors (i.e., temperature, precipitation, land use, vegetation, and landcover). This research aims to determine the geographic distribution of Coccidioides in Utah and identify predictors of Coccidioides presence to inform risk maps. We are conducting ecological field work, collecting soil samples and detailed environmental data from active rodent burrows at sites along an elevation gradient that spans the Mojave Basin Range, Colorado Plateau, and Wasatch and Uinta Mountains. DNA is extracted from soil and tested for Coccidioides with qPCR. We have collected 583 soil samples at 37 sites. Of those, 27/353 (7.5%) tested are positive for Coccidioides. Thus far, we have found at least 1 Coccidioides-positive burrow at 8 of 18 (44.4%) sites. We will use boosted regression trees to model site-level Coccidioides burrow positivity as a function of environmental and climatic variables. Our modeling results will inform maps of Coccidioides endemicity and will inform awareness about risk of Valley fever disease among people living in endemic areas and their healthcare providers