Each year, the Valley Fever Center for Excellence hosts the Farness Lecture. Orin J Farness was a physician in Tucson and is credited with identifying the first culturally proven Arizona patient with coccidioidomycosis, published in 1938. Dr. Farness also conducted skin test surveys in Pima County, demonstrating that most persons had delayed type dermal hypersensitivity to coccidioidin. A lecture in his honor was endowed by his widow and from 1975 through 1991 it was administered by the Tucson Medical Center and the University of Arizona’s Respiratory Sciences Center. When the Valley Fever Center for Excellence was approved by the Arizona Board of Regents in 1996, the Farness Lecture Series was resumed.
This year's lecture was presented by Dr. Charles Daley, a Professor of Medicine at University of Colorado, Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, and National Jewish Health, where he is also the chief of their Mycobacterial and Respiratory Infections Division. His Lecture “Nontuberculous Mycobacterial Infections: What’s in a name?” went in depth on the effects, process of identification, and different treatments for Nontuberculous Mycobacterial Infections, as well as the process of using taxonomic rules to create names for these different infections.
