Fever prompts inmate transfer

State officials have agreed to “fully comply” with a federal order to relocate up to 2,600 state prisoners considered at risk of contracting valley fever.

Late in June, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ordered California to move the prisoners out of the San Joaquin Valley’s Avenal and Pleasant Valley state prisons and into other state prisons, according to California Healthline. Henderson gave California seven days to begin moving inmates and 90 days to complete the transfer, also mandating that no new prisoners considered at risk of contracting valley fever be sent to either prison.

The order followed a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigation into the deaths of more than three dozen prisoners who contracted the fungal disease. California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation officials said they will begin “the complicated logistics” of moving the prisoners.