Occupational Valley Fever

I helped develop the content for a Valley fever tailgate training guide for the construction industry. Check out the guide in English and in Spanish!

My dissertation focused on uncertainty, risk, and occupational exposures to Valley fever in California. Rates of Valley fever are on the rise in California. This trend is likely to continue with a warming climate and development in the Central Valley and Central Coast. With this in mind, my research points to Valley fever as a growing social and occupational health problem.

My dissertation asked: what do we know about occupational exposures to Valley fever? How do we know what we know? And how is our ability to protect workers limited by processes of stratification that shape what we know? And finally, when workers get sick how do regulatory institutions prove their illness occurred on the job and how do employers attempt to limit their liability? My dissertation:

1. Examined the burden of occupational Valley fever in California using data from workers’ compensation in collaboration with the California Department of Public Health Occupational Health Branch and detailed archival data collection and analysis.

2. Critically examined how stratification processes, data creation, data reporting, and data cleaning work to construct our knowledge about Valley fever as an occupational health problem.

3. ·Assessed how arguments about risk and responsibility influence the dispute resolution process in two arenas concerning Valley fever workplace exposures: workers’ compensation appeals cases and OSHA appeals cases.

Funding Received:

• UC Davis Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety Rapid Response Grant (2021)

Dissertation Publicly Available Here