EPA UAS CoP Nov24_Detecting Valley Fever Fungus Spores with UAS in California

Presentation to EPA's Quarterly EPA Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Community of Practice.  Welcome to the updated quarterly meeting series for the EPA UAS Community of Practice.  The purpose of this group is to share UAS experiences, technical information, standard operating procedures and best practices across the Agency.  Check out the EPA UAS CoP Team.  Agenda: FY 2025 CoP Survey Data storage Preliminary annual report metrics Updates on the policy process Presentation: James Markwiese - Detecting Valley Fever Fungus Spores with UAS in California

Impact/Purpose

We demonstrated a novel approach for detecting airborne Coccidioides. Our findings suggest that portable button aerosol samplers sampling at lower flow rates (and even without UAS integration) could be leveraged to assess personal exposure to Coccidioides spores. We demonstrate isolation of C. immitis in only 176-184 L of air using lightweight portable samplers that filter air at a rate akin to human breathing (8 L/min). Our study found C. immitis DNA in 4.9% of air samples, similar to the positivity rate found in Phoenix, AZ (7.4%), which relied on high-volume fixed-location samplers that filtered 2,400 of liters of air (16).

Citation

Markwiese, J. EPA UAS CoP Nov24_Detecting Valley Fever Fungus Spores with UAS in California. Quarterly EPA Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Community of Practice, RTP, NC, November 18, 2024.