Mark King, 50, uses his wheelchair to get around the Pleasant Valley State Prison gymnasium where he sleeps. Valley Fever, which he contracted at the prison, led to a four-month hospital stay, where he lost 30 pounds. “It got so bad I almost died,” he said. Photo: Brian Baer, Sacramento Bee

Valley Fever attacks the body through the respiratory system When breathed, the fungus enters the lungs where it acts like a cancer and grows in tumor-like lesions along the wall of your lungs. After time these lesions burst and spread at the point you develop what is known as cocci-pneumonia, where the lungs fill with fluid and inflammation sets in, making it very hard to breathe.

It now attacks your joints, creating cysts and eventually causing the bones in your extremities to deteriorate, leaving you an invalid. And if you have the misfortune of this fungus reaching your spine, it attacks the fluid in your spine and you are likely to develop spinal meningitis as well as fluid on the brain. Your survival probability has now just gone from slim to non-existing.

Now that you have an idea of what Valley Fever is, allow me to inform you of the situation here at Pleasant Valley State slave camp. Out of approximately 600 cases in the California central valley, over 500 cases of Valley Fever come directly from Pleasant Valley State Prison.

The California Department of Corrections and "Rehabilitation" is fully aware of this problem yet refuses to do anything about it. The reason they refuse is due to the fact that our governor wants to build out here as part of his prison-expansion-to-ease-overcrowding-plan, and to acknowledge this Valley Fever epidemic would mean that our governor is purposely placing African-Americans in harm's way.

When we were convicted in these courts, the judges sentenced us to serve an amount of time in confinement for our crimes - not to die for our crimes. If you have a chronic lung disease such as asthma and/or any other illness that lowers your immune system and CDCR houses you in this environment, your life has been placed in immediate danger!

I am alerting African-Americans to this problem on behalf of all my brothers and sisters trapped behind these enemy lines. If you have a family member locked down here in the Central Valley and you are blessed with the ability to come visit them, you need to be made aware of this risk to your health, because CDCR is not going to look out for your wellbeing or no one else's except maybe the officers' union.

P.S. I need you to know the reason I bring this information to the African-American community is because after some research I have found that African-Americans are among the high risk groups for contracting the most severe forms of Valley Fever.

Do the research; get informed!

Send Wakeel some encouraging words: Wakeel Swanson, P-41463, B3-139-up, PVSP, P.O. Box 8502, Coalinga, CA 93210.

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