When Jennine Ochoa became pregnant at the end of 2017, she didn’t know what to expect. At 42, she’d waited longer than most women to start a family. But she said her first five months were easy. “I had no morning sickness, nothing,” she said. “It was completely uneventful until May.” That’s when a dust storm rolled over her home in rural Tulare County in California’s arid San Joaquin Valley. “A week later I started coughing really bad,” she said. “The hardest I’ve ever coughed in my life, to the point where I was vomiting.” In just one week she said she lost 10 pounds. Only when an itchy rash broke out on her legs a few days later did she suspect she had valley fever, a fungal disease that’s caused by inhaling spores that grow in soil in the desert southwest. “Being a scientist, I pulled up the literature, went to the CDC website, and there was a recent paper on valley fever and pregnancy and I read it,” she said. Ochoa is a veterinary pathologist. She performs necropsies on livestock
https://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/kvpr/files/styles/big_story/public/201810/ValleyFever1.jpg