An unusual outbreak of windborne coccidioidomycosis.

EARLY in the morning on December 20, 1977, high-velocity winds centered around Arvin, a town at the southern extreme of the San Joaquin Valley near Bakersfield, in Kern County, California, bore aloft soil containing arthroconidia of Coccidioides immitis. Dispersion of this soil by peculiar wind conditions resulted in an epidemic of coccidioidomycosis in an area encompassing approximately 87,000 km2, an area larger than the state of Maine. We report the morbidity, mortality and cost of the epidemic in Sacramento County, an area of 2797 km2 at the northern limit of the San Joaquin Valley, which is normally an . . .