Can Form 8854 Timely 2023-2024

Hello, I'm Dr. Tom Chiller, Chief of the Mycotic Diseases Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to this program on valley fever timely diagnosis, early assessment, and proper management. Today, I'm thrilled to have with me two experts on valley fever: Dr. John Galgiani at the University of Arizona and Director of the Center for Valley Fever, and Dr. George Thompson in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of California Davis. Welcome to you both and thanks for joining this educational activity on valley fever. Before we start the conversation, I'd like to highlight that we're going to use a tutorial as an outline for this program that was developed at the Valley Fever Center for Excellence with the help of CDC. This is a great resource to help learn how to recognize and manage patients with valley fever, or coccidioidomycosis. The tutorial, in its expanded form, is available on the website of the Valley Fever Center for Excellence. It uses a very useful acronym which we're going to use throughout this program today: COXY (COCC I C). Consider the diagnosis, order the right tests, check for risk factors, check for complications, and initiate management. So let's start with a quick review about valley fever. Valley fever, or coccidioidomycosis, which we often refer to as COXY, is caused by the fungi Coccidioides immitis and Coccidioides posadasii (C. I and C. P). Although around 10 to 20,000 cases are reported to us at the CDC each year, we know that many more infections occur in the United States, with estimates in the hundreds of thousands. This map shows our current understanding of the geographic range of valley fever, but we know that we are identifying the fungus in the environment beyond these...