“And that’s concerning, because if we’re recognizing those locations, where are the places it’s occurring that just have not been recognized quite yet?” Thompson co-authored an article published Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, which suggests that more than 10% of fungal infections are diagnosed outside regions where the pathogens are known to be endemic.Meanwhile, the fungus histoplasma, which can cause an illness marked by fever, cough and fatigue, tends to survive longer in high humidity — a condition that’s also becoming more common as temperatures rise.“The great majority of people who get Valley fever will tell you they got a cough that lasts a few weeks and it goes away,” said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.“But when people are immunosuppressed or when they just have bad luck because they got a very large dose, these diseases can disseminate, or get outside the lung.” Typically, different fungal infections are associated with specific regions: Valley fever is most common in the Southwest, for example, whereas histoplasmosis is mostly identified in central and eastern states.But here’s a patient who’s never traveled from Massachusetts and he has it, so funny thing.’ But I’m like, ‘You do have it; it’s just the maps are not up to date anymore.’” The last study that updated geographic distributions of disease-causing fungi in the U.S. based on patient data was in 1969, according to Spec’s study."