3 Ventura County Deaths Linked to Valley Fever : Health: Two more names are added to earlier report of a man who succumbed to the quake-related illness.

Federal disease officials confirmed Tuesday that three Ventura County residents died of valley fever, an airborne fungus carried on clouds of dust kicked up by the Jan. 17 Northridge earthquake.

Initially, the Centers for Disease Control reported that a 71-year-old Simi Valley man died in March in an unprecedented outbreak of 203 cases of the flu-like illness that followed the earthquake.

But after further investigation, the agency attached two more deaths--a 56-year-old Oxnard man in May and a 71-year-old Newbury Park woman in June--to the valley fever outbreak, a CDC epidemiologist said.

The three deaths will be outlined in a report that the CDC plans to forward in two weeks to the Ventura County Public Health Services Department, said the CDC’s Dr. Eileen Schneider.

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Schneider and other federal researchers began investigating the connection between valley fever and the earthquake after Ventura County logged four times more cases in a few weeks than it had reported in all of 1993. Schneider would not name the people who died, citing their families’ right to privacy.

The Newbury Park woman died of valley fever-related pneumonia about two months after she was diagnosed with the illness, Schneider said. The Oxnard man, who had suffered diabetes and other medical problems, also died about two months after being diagnosed, she said.

“It’s not unusual that people die of valley fever,” Schneider said. “It’s rare, but it does occur.”

Valley fever is actually a fungal infection scientists call coccidioidomycosis.

The fungus lives in the earth, but the Jan. 17 earthquake and hundreds of aftershocks threw it into the air in tan-colored clouds of dust, researchers believe. And hundreds of people--particularly in Simi Valley and eastern Ventura County--inhaled the spores.

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In about 60% of cases, the infection produces no symptoms. But within about two to five weeks of inhaling the spores, some people experience flu-like exhaustion, coughing, high fever and even pneumonia. The illness usually hits older people the hardest.

More than 120 of the 203 earthquake-related cases of valley fever afflicted Simi Valley residents, while about 40 were found in Thousand Oaks and even fewer in Westlake Village and Camarillo.

Last year, before the earthquake, there were only 52 cases of valley fever diagnosed in all of Ventura County.

The earthquake-related cases were noted on a map in the county public health department, which showed that valley fever spores might have spread out southwesterly from Simi Valley toward Thousand Oaks on seaward breezes before thinning out over the Oxnard Plain.

The magnitude 6.8 earthquake was centered in the San Fernando Valley, but health officials there have reported little change in the numbers of people infected there: Only 46 cases had been reported there by late August.