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Every year without a doubt you probably hear these fearful words: “It’s going to be the worst allergy season ever.” Is it just a scare tactic or is there something to it? This year, science can back up the popular claim.
“There’s a couple factors,” Dr. Clifford Bassett, founder and medical director at Allergy and Asthma Care of New York, told weather.com. “One is the rising long term increase in carbon dioxide and its effect on increased production of pollen,” and another is what he calls “the priming effect.”
A study concluded that climate warming and the resultant weather effects are "an important factor" in causing the pollen allergy season to be more intense, and this year Dr. Bassett expects the trend to continue. Climate warming and increased carbon dioxide is having a positive effect on pollen production (and thus a negative effect on pollen allergy sufferers).
Rising temperatures are also to blame. Dr. Bassett explains that hotter summer seasons can result in a stronger pollen season the following spring. “The summer temperature may have an impact on the following spring season as far as grass and tree pollen, which are the representative and most important pollen in the spring.”
“In some studies, a very heavy precipitation during the fall and winter may be enough to enhance the pollen production, particularly in grass pollen,” Dr. Bassett said. “So we may see more grass pollens flowering early and more robustly from a very heavy precipitation in fall and winter, which we’ve seen in many areas. When plants are under stress, they may make more flowers and less leaves and therefore they’ll be more pollen.”
Are you reaching for the tissues yet? There is yet another factor contributing to scary pollen forecasts this spring: the priming effect.
As Dr. Bassett describes, the priming effect is when temperatures make big leaps in small periods of time. For instance, when one day the weather is around 30 degrees Fahrenheit and the next the mercury rises to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, the doctor says, “that’s when people really start to suffer.”
The constantly changing and highly varied temperatures cause your body to “[rev] up the immune system and further on down the road, you’re going to be even more hyper-sensitive or hyperactive to the new pollen.” Basically, your body doesn’t take kindly to all of the stop-and-go cues from the weather, which causes increased sensitivity to allergens once they’re released.
“So it’s a hodge-podge,” Dr. Bassett said of the different factors leading doctors to expect this allergy season to be one of the worst. “The trees store up energy in the winter and all that precipitation,” mixed with the other available information about influences on pollen production, “I feel, will cause a very robust pollen explosion.”
By Ashleigh Schmitz Morley
Published Feb 24 2015 01:47 PM EST
weather.com
