You were off planet‽
Now it's like an epidemic, at least half the office is affected.
Here in Finland I've never been affected by any kind of tree pollen at all, but somehow timothy grass pollen gives me horrible symptoms, forcing me to take antihistamine most of the summer. I lived my childhood near farmland and forests, so definitely got exposed to both forms of pollen at early age.
And I got it as an adult, in 2009. So 26 years without any allergies, then suddenly, one summer in Helsingborg, the air was thick with pollen. I remember the smell was like cheese doodles in the air, musty.
Once I got back from an errand in the city my face was leaking, I walked to the pharmacy with blurry vision to get my first antihistamines. Ever since then every year june is a nightmare. It affects your sleep, so it affects every part of life.
And since then I've observed more and more pollen allergies around me, friends, co-workers, strangers on the bus. It's very prevalent.
I would not be surprised if humans caused this somehow with our modern city planning.
Germany, area 357,022 km2 (137,847 sq mi) water 1.27%
Japan, area 377,975 km2 (145,937 sq mi), water 1.4%
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
I guess poking around for a good representative study, it's actually low diversity of microbial exposure, not "cleaning" per-se that is correlated - e.g this is one reason why households with dogs have lower allergy rates. A monoculture of certain tree species also implies less microbial diversity.
1. The immune system is not being exposed enough to wild or even infectious content, and it needs more threats to fight off.
2. ("Old Friends") The immune system is not being exposed enough to commensal or even symbiotic organisms that we co-evolved with, throwing off its calibration and tuning.
I instinctively prefer the second, the first seems a little too simple, like some some scaled-down version of "tough love" and "spare the rod[-bacteria], spoil the child."
There's a hypothesis that says the incidence of allergies correlates inversely with the incidence of certain common parasites, like the tapeworm or the pinworm. Additionally, nowadays pregnant women are advised to avoid getting infected with toxoplasmosis due to the birth defects it causes, but it wasn't until the 70s when the last route of transmission was found and explained.
What if the body is just looking for parasites where there are none?
EDIT: I also lean on the second, as the first doesn't explain why allergies can come and go seemingly without reason.
Personally currently I'm allergic to some unindentified plant and it's a different one than back when I was a child. Meanwhile my child is right now experiencing "my" childhood allergy season - with similar severity at that.
If it's possible, and it can force a function up a gradient, life is almost certainly doing it somewhere.
You can definitely undertrain, or overwhelm, the immune system if not cautious!
I actually seemed to grow out of hay fever when I was in my early 20s. Perhaps coincidentally this is also around the time I developed an allergy to cannabis from overuse. Wonder if they’re related somehow.
Upside is I discovered the trick of just taking fexofenadine every single day which had the side effect of solving my chronic sinus infections.
Actually now that I think about it never head really problems with allergies even in Southeast Asia, though I was in very green areas, maybe humidity helps as well?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_cover_by_state_and_terr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...
We prefer male trees in cities since they do not produce fruit that drop on the streets. The result is a much higher pollen load.
Urban developers who make the mistake of using male trees, because they don't drop fruit/berries/seed pods, will make the residents suffer pollen. Sugi and hinoki apparently are not gendered -- they're monoecious.
I'm really hating this trend of diluting content by giving useless testimonials, random anecdotes and delaying the resolution of the subject as much as possible.
You could summarise all of Ender's Game in a couple of sentences but, guess what, that wouldn't be particularly pleasurable.
Not everything has to by hyper-efficient. More importantly, not everything has to be tailored specifically for you. It's OK that other people like reading long-form content.
> When the sugi and hinoki forests were first planted in the 1950s and 60s, they weren't meant to stand forever. At the time, it was assumed they would be gradually cut down and replanted over time, as had been the case before the war. But as Japan's economy boomed in the late 60s and 70s, major cities like Kobe and Tokyo grew rapidly, and it ended up being cheaper to import wood from other countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.
But isn't that what we're seeing around the world? Be it cheaper labor, political control or whatever else, imported goods can be cheaper than locally produced goods.
They couldn’t help but put in ideological bs.