Half-way through the article:
"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."
As often in environmental health, the cost-benefit ratio is calculated after the exposure is widespread, i.e. too late.
Hmm, most German forests are also vast monoculture 'tree farms' and have been for the last 250 years (also caused by large scale deforestation in the centuries before). In the Ore Mountains we also have those yellow clouds of pollen coming off spruce trees every few years, covering everything with a thin yellow dust layer, yet I'm not aware that the number of people with pollen allergies is exceptionally high (oth, maybe it was 200 years ago and by now the population has become immune, or maybe the tree pollen in Japan is just more aggressive...).
The spruce and other local conifers (I live by the Bohemian Forest/Bayerischer Wald) have pollen that seems to be low allergenic by design. I know a lot of people who are allergic to birch or weed pollen, but not to spruce.
I read it as "breeds selected to be low-allergenic" by the relative orgs that I assume (re)planted them there but I have no real idea about german forests and the processes of planting trees there.
Yes. I relate myself with that. If i am in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, no issues.. in Germany, i have terrible problems with allergies too.
"A biome (/ˈbaɪ.oʊm/ BY-ohm) is a distinct geographical region with specific climate, vegetation, animal life, and an ecosystem. It consists of a biological community that has formed in response to its physical environment and regional climate." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome
Pollen allergies have definitely skyrocketed in Sweden. We used to be able to sit in an office and work all year without hearing people sniffle and sneeze.
Now it's like an epidemic, at least half the office is affected.
Probably we can blame higher hygiene standards, or some other environmental factor for it. Forests haven't changed much in past decades.
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.
Once you get sensitized, it gets worse every year, right?
Since my teenage years I was mildly allergic to pollen, and now in my adulthood it seems to be getting progressively worse. Each spring is worse than the previous one, and the antihistamines do less effect (or so I subjectively feel).
I've had seasonal allergies for decades and haven't seen them trend more intense, though some years have more allergens than others.
Personally I only take allergy medication maybe 50-100 days a year, and usually just a half dose. I have definitely heard from people with worse symptoms that they get a tolerance to medications so it may help to switch between them if you take them year round.
Not _necessarily_. I had big problems with pollen when I was a kid, but very rarely, these days (there seems to be _something_ that causes me difficulty for a few weeks a year, but that's more or less it now).
That is the general pattern but not always. I never used to have allergies and then developed them a few years ago. Was very miserable for a couple months every year for about 5 years but they disappeared again a couple years ago. I tried a few things like taking a spoonful of local honey every day etc. Ultimately I don't know what made the difference sadly but I haven't been bothered by seasonal allergies for several years now.
Covid fucked with people in various, not easy to measure ways. Some effects went away (like losing smell and taste, but it took months for me), some... not so much.
When I get cold/sneezing (the usual non-flu winter sickness) I cough much more since covid, more thick sputum created in the lower part of the throat. Talked with few people around and they confirmed they feel similar effects.
Allergies could easily be another area where effects can be subtle but permanent in some individuals. My father's hair got almost completely white after he almost ended up on ventilation for example. We as family with 2 kids (back then babies) had covid at least 11-12 times so far (confirmed by tests, wife is a doctor), plus few other probably-but-not-tested. Most recent one last autumn was like immunity went to 0 again, was coughing away nasty stuff for another month. I am glad I just survived all that, some of that was mild and some was pretty harsh on body and mind.
I had exactly the same experience. After I contracted Covid, until last year, it usually took me 2 weeks to stop coughing after the other symptoms went away. I think what improved the situation is exercise. I started to sprint walk a lot since last year and so far I haven’t had any long cough since then.
My son also got asthma after Covid. But he also improved when he grew a bit older (now close to six). We still give him the pumps whenever he had a bad cold, though.
Hope you and your family get better. It is very nasty. It is not life threatening but threatens pretty much everything else.
one one had Japan seem to have quite bad luck with the specific tree(s) mass planted
but also on the other hand in Germany problems with allergies are very common and a pretty big deal for many people, it's just that we got used to it
but also while Germany has not-very-diverse "tree farms" for a very long time, the level of monoculture got way worse in the last 70-100 years AFIK, especially after WW2 the only way to cope with the extreme high demand was to mostly plant very fast growing trees. I.e. mostly spruce and pine.
Idk. if allergies got worse due to this and we just didn't notice because of having so much bigger problems (like many cities lying in ashes) or if Germany always had similar bad allergy problems. But this WW2 induced increase in monoculture is still a huge problem even ignoring allergies as this made German forests especially susceptible to things like pests and adding stress from climate change has lead to mass dying of trees in some regions.
Yes true, especially the Harz mountains currently look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland (also visible on Google Maps), it will take decades to regrow with more diverse and climate resistant tree types, but worth it (compared to reforesting with another layer of fast growing trees of the same type).
On average sure, but there are regions in Germany with both high amount of forest areas and fairly high population density (e.g. Ore Mountain region up to 50% forest area and more than 200 people/km^2).
My aunt in Poland has terrible allergies now because of yellow pollen from spruce, but I'm not sure how that translates to larger population, other than it does happen
Pollen can be broadly separated into airborne and not-airborne.
Ragweed pollen is light enough to be borne miles by wind. Goldenrod pollen is too heavy for that, but is sticky, and is carried on fur and feathers. Ironically, people blame the showy goldenrod blooms for allergies, although they likely have never had goldenrod pollen in their breathing passages - while lowly, hiding ragweed unleashes millions of barbed pollens spores upon their breathing passages. (Ragweed flowers are small and green - you can stare at a plant and not realize it's blooming!)
Likewise: the sap of poison ivy is strongly allergenic; the sap of maple trees almost never, due to reactivity with immune systems. Americans are likely to be exposed to both.
So, in short: there are plants that are potential allergy-sources, and others that are not.
>Every year, an area is selectively clear-cut, removing sugi, hinoki but also other invasive species like bamboo. Broadleaf trees are left, and with more sun coming through to the ground, they grow back, along with other new seedlings either planted by staff or brought by birds or animals.
In other parts of the world, some plantation -> forest projects don't remove trees but instead pull them over and leave them as logs with exposed roots. This provides new habitats for various plants and animals around the logs and the gap in the canopy. I'm curious if they've explored the impacts that approach would have.
Hmm, I'm also wondering about studies about overly sanitized environments for children being correlated with higher allergy rates.
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.
I'd like to preemptively draw a line between two different kinds of hypothesis when it comes to hygiene:
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.
IIRC there has been scientists looking at what substances and pathways the parasites, particularly the helminths family, might affect because the parasites have a evolutionary "motivation" to suppress immune responses, at least to some degree in the host.
What if the human body's response to external influences (including parasites) is nuanced and complex?
What if the very idea of "parasite" is overly redactive: maybe there are both advantages and disadvantages of having another organism in your internal biome, in varying amounts?
An excellent distinction to make. Life however often says "Why not both? And 11 more you'd have never thought of. And one that seems impossible just for fun."
If it's possible, and it can force a function up a gradient, life is almost certainly doing it somewhere.
I wonder why we focus so much on this claim, when there are many studies giving other plausible explanations.
> Living less than 75 m from the main road was significantly associated with lifetime allergic rhinitis (AR), past-year AR symptoms, diagnosed AR, and treated AR. The distance to the main road (P for trend=0.001), the length of the main road (P for trend=0.041), and the proportion of the main road area (P for trend=0.006) had an exposure-response relationship with allergic sensitization. A strong inverse association was observed between residential proximity to the main load and lung function, especially FEV1, FEV1/FVC, and FEF25-75.
> The most serious issue might be the growing trend in sensitization to pollen, especially in urban settings (7, 8); in fact, people living near heavy traffic are affected with pollen-induced respiratory allergies more than those in rural districts (9). The sudden rise in environmental pollutant levels due to industrial development and urban motor vehicle traffic has affected air quality and consequently, the severity and mortality from allergic diseases (10). Some evidence suggests that air pollution might cause new cases of asthma as well (9, 11).
This doesn't mean that exposure to biodiversity doesn't play a role, but when it comes to explaining the differences between rural and urban settings, this explanation seems more plausible to me than the hand-wavey claims about people supposedly cleaning their apartments more in cities.
Personally, I have seasonal asthma associated with pollen, since childhood, and I'm from a big city.
I have a much harder time walking next to a busy road in allergy season than being somewhere more rural, even when there are birch trees right in the vicinity of where I am, one of my allergenes.
It's not b/w of course though, the pollen can trigger it not only in the city. But then it's usually very mild.
My asthma is seasonal, allergy-associated, and still, the worst stressor I experience is pollution and car exhaust. Well, the worst unavoidable stressor.
Alcohol also seems to do bad things to my allergy response.
I live off on a city side street off of a major avenue in my city. Diesel soot looks (other than color) and behaves like pollen. Next week i'll be cleaning the pollen and soot particles from my porch. I personally don't suffer from allergies too bad (just headaches during peak pollen release), but my wife really does.
When I grew up in NYC, i was too young to remember allergies, but I can recall cubbies for inhalers as many of my classmates had asthma. We happened to be downwind from the Exxon refinery and Greenpoint garbage incinerator.
It can go the other direction, too: exposure to moldy home environments gave me (now resolved) food sensitivities, dust allergies, pet-associated allergies, etc.
You can definitely undertrain, or overwhelm, the immune system if not cautious!
Don't underestimate the amount of cockroach debris present in a modern home. There's a positive correlation between asthma and in-home roach population.
Maybe some plywood cheap old US homes full of holes or crevices, but here in Europe if you have cockroach infection and not blind or similarly disabled, you know it. They are not exactly hiding in the evening/night.
I was surprised to not find anything about possible cures or treatments in the article.
I had bad allergies myself in my teenage years - unable to sleep for weeks - I finally sought help. The western medicine offers protein shots (similar treatment as to food allergies) but I heard good things about acupuncture. First, I was very skeptical about how needles could "help" with allergies. But about 2 months into the treatment (two sessions per week) the pollen season started. The air felt "heavy to breathe" but to my surprise I was not effected that year at all. After finishing the whole treatment I was allergy free for many years. Now I sometimes feel it on bad days with clouds of pollen hanging in humid air. My uneducated guess is, that my acupuncture treatment I received over 2 decades ago "wears off".
I wonder if others experienced similar or if I was a statistical outlier to a well shaped Gauss curve?
I live in Japan and developed an allergy to cedar pollen after I came. I started sublingual immunotherapy (a pill of concentrated pollen you dissolve under your tongue) three years ago and now can make it through the pollen season symptom-free. Supposedly you even keep the immunity after stopping the medication, though I have not tested that yet.
I was surprised to read that our allergies evolve, though perhaps I shouldn't have been. When I lived in the midwest of the USA, I hated mowing the lawn so much. I became a gunked-up mess with my sinuses packed with snot, regardless of antihistamines and (new at the time) allergy meds that presaged our present treatments.
I'd lived in the Bay Area for one or two months before a neighbor in my apartment complex knocked to ask if it was standard to not have an air conditioner in the residence (something that had surprised me as well). She said that keeping the windows open was aggravating her allergies and it was the first moment that I realized I could breathe easily through my nose. I don't know what grows where I grew up that isn't here, but getting away from it really changed my quality of life.
Severe allergies can be so intrusive that I'd consider moving out of the country if I was in the situation described in this article. But I only think that because I've experienced the effect of changing regions and experiencing a radically different outcome. If someone grew up with this being normal, they might never consider getting away. I certainly didn't think it could be better or worse if I lived someplace else.
"Evolve" doesn't well describe the very real possibility that you were/are more reactive to species popular in the Midwest, but not the Bay Area.
By "evolve", I thought you mean "change within the individual over their lifetime" - which also happens. I spent time in oxygen tents as a young child; I mostly suffer from (easily treated) sinus issues as an adult.
Also, our drugs have improved mightily, but that's obviously not relevant for an increase in allergies amongst the population (separate from the above meaning of "evolve").
Edit: I guess I'm not sure what you meant by the word.
That's not actually a thing. Very few trees we plant have specific male vs female plants. One of the few that does that gets brought up in this context, ginko, tends to have male trees preferred because the fruit kind of reeks. Ginkgo fruit is also toxic so you really don't want masses of it getting washed into local waterways in ecosystems the tree isn't native to - not a great time for the local wildlife. A significant supermajority of all the rest of the trees that you plant in cities are gonna have male and female flowers on the same plant or male and female structures within the same flower.
I do think you mean sex, not gender - trees don't really have a gender or gender expression. Either way, it would be rather irrelevant, as most trees planted in cities have both male and female flowers (oak, birch, most conifers), or even hermaphroditic flowers (citrus).
thanks for this clarification. until today i was under the impression that they planted male trees only because they looked prettier and weren't as messy as the female ones (to reduce the cleaning bill of the local municipal)
Interesting. I noticed that many people have hay fever in Japan, but I always just assumed it was genetic or something. I wonder if living there for a long time will make you more sensitive to pollen
As someone who has suffered from hay fever for my entire life, and also lived in many different locations, almost every move came with a 2-3 year reprieve from my symptoms while my body "discovered" the fun new local allergens.
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.
Poison ivy/oak sensitivity varies with lifetime exposure. On rare occasions, it is inverse: careful exposure can sometimes lead to resistance. More commonly: you get more sensitive over your lifetime, and some "once immune" people end up catastrophically changing due to incautious exposure.
Yes. I developed hay fever after living here in Japan for a couple years. Was fine the first few years, though it was amusing to watch "yellow clouds of pollen" being blown from the trees with random gusts of wind. Now it's not so amusing. My car windows are dusted with a new layer of "light yellow" every couple days now (in season).
It's super easy to be allergic to cedar pollen because it is such a fine pollen. I developed a cedar pollen allergy within a couple years of moving from somewhere with no cedar to a heavily forested area with cedar. No other allergies to anything, I don't think I'm particularly prone. I tried doing the allergy shots for it for a while but it didn't seem to do much. What works is staying inside with the house sealed up and air filters running, or just getting the hell out of town for a month+.
I got hayfever on my 3rd year of living here, and it seems like quite a common pattern among immigrants I've noticed. I have hayfever back in the UK too, but I guess I didn't have a Cedar allergy - so it took time to develop.
I have been living in Japan for almost 8 years now, and I didn't have any allergy ever until a month ago when all of sudden it hit me like a hammer. Good god was it painful...
I would assume it has more to do with less exposition to hay/pollen in urban areas, for instance in years in Beijing I've had hardly allergies since it is not exactly green, though I went to parks, but here in Prague right now with everything blooming it's nuts.
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?
I think the humidity has to play a role in that. Very dry air is not good for the nose even without allergies. This year the spring is very dry and also quite cold in Central Europe which makes things worse.
Allergies are weird. I definitely became more sensitive to hay fever after a gastric bypass.
I have a friend who for no apparent reason developed strong allergies in their sixties. Particularly to goats milk.
So much so that they will not go to a restaurant that has goat milk products (e.g.: halloumi cheese) in their kitchen due to one too many visits to the hospital emergency ward.
That more or less checks out, in my case. I think it started in like 4-5 years for me and it's absolutely terrible in Tokyo in the spring time. Thankfully I moved to Okinawa where they didn't plant those trees, or if they did there are much less of them.
I don’t consider that a good Wikipedia article because it does a bad job distinguishing between natural forests and mono-/bicultural plantations of which there are vast areas of here. It’s quite like calling wheat fields ”grasslands”. Both fundamentally lack biodiversity.
Not really for a mountain island. Being near the coast means increased moisture and wind, which hits mountains to make rain. Take a japanese-sized slice off the coast of most countries and you will find lots of forrest. Think the pacific northwest, or the bits of hawaii not covered in lava. Then compare parts of the australian coast with no mountains.
Doesn't pollen also have to do with the "gender" of the trees? In gendered trees, male trees emit pollen and female trees intercept pollen. Not all species of trees are gendered (dioecious) but various are. If reforestation uses male trees at the expense of female, then pollen count will be higher.
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.
Most trees (about 75%) contain both male & female flowers. Of the rest, about half are species with separate male/female trees and about half have separate male/female flowers (on the same tree).
The article makes the argument "there is a lot of pollen" and separately "there exist monoculture forests / tree farms" in Japan.
But what it doesn't do is:
1. Argue that the pollen is worse because of monoculture relative to polyculture forests (we could mix sugi and hinoki and...I assume net pollen would be the same?)
2. Argue that lots of pollen leads to more allergies. I mean, you might think that higher levels of exposure in childhood would lead to *fewer* people with allergies. So maybe a lack of forests in the past --> lots of people with allergies today? Why are the Japanese so allergic?
This article is bad and the author should feel bad.
>Argue that lots of pollen leads to more allergies.
With pollen, particulate size tends to matter. Pine tree pollen is very rarely an allergen because the pollen grains are huge, and I believe the body catches and rejects these pretty easily. Tiny pollen grains and ones with particular shapes can get much deeper in the lungs and aggravate things more easily.
This article could have been summarized in three paragraphs.
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.
I think its the same in Germany no? Heuschnupfen is something that got worse over the time and if i remember correct is as well related with some reforest project..
> 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.
I don't get the relevance of "major cities grew rapidly". That can only mean that demand for wood spiked. There's no way it can cause local wood to become less competitive with imported wood.
It sounds contradictory but it often does. When a part of the economy booms, it may make other parts of the economy less able to keep up because they cannot increase profitability at the same pace (so people will seek jobs with larger salaries, or investments will go different ways). Moreover, increase of demand can drive seeking cheaper sources of a product, which then overtakes the previous ones due to being cheaper (while before this increase due to regulations or lack of certain network/supply chain it may not have been possible or profitable enough to seek these sources).
If I had to guess - lumber costs might be dominated by labor costs? If they don't have guest worker programs it might not be cost effective anymore as wages go up
> There's no way it can cause local wood to become less competitive with imported wood.
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.
> A 1950s project is to blame
Half-way through the article: "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."
As often in environmental health, the cost-benefit ratio is calculated after the exposure is widespread, i.e. too late.
Hmm, most German forests are also vast monoculture 'tree farms' and have been for the last 250 years (also caused by large scale deforestation in the centuries before). In the Ore Mountains we also have those yellow clouds of pollen coming off spruce trees every few years, covering everything with a thin yellow dust layer, yet I'm not aware that the number of people with pollen allergies is exceptionally high (oth, maybe it was 200 years ago and by now the population has become immune, or maybe the tree pollen in Japan is just more aggressive...).
The spruce and other local conifers (I live by the Bohemian Forest/Bayerischer Wald) have pollen that seems to be low allergenic by design. I know a lot of people who are allergic to birch or weed pollen, but not to spruce.
By design? Who designed the pollen in those trees?
I assume they meant the people who planted those "tree farms", that they chose trees people were less allergic to.
I read it as "breeds selected to be low-allergenic" by the relative orgs that I assume (re)planted them there but I have no real idea about german forests and the processes of planting trees there.
I guess they meant 'by nature', but maybe not, which will be fun to hear!
I moved to Germany as an adult from a completely separate biome, and I’ve got terrible problems with allergies I never had in my home country
Yes. I relate myself with that. If i am in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, no issues.. in Germany, i have terrible problems with allergies too.
[flagged]
"A biome (/ˈbaɪ.oʊm/ BY-ohm) is a distinct geographical region with specific climate, vegetation, animal life, and an ecosystem. It consists of a biological community that has formed in response to its physical environment and regional climate." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome
Pollen allergies have definitely skyrocketed in Sweden. We used to be able to sit in an office and work all year without hearing people sniffle and sneeze.
Now it's like an epidemic, at least half the office is affected.
Probably we can blame higher hygiene standards, or some other environmental factor for it. Forests haven't changed much in past decades.
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.
Yes timotej is my allergy as well.
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.
Once you get sensitized, it gets worse every year, right?
Since my teenage years I was mildly allergic to pollen, and now in my adulthood it seems to be getting progressively worse. Each spring is worse than the previous one, and the antihistamines do less effect (or so I subjectively feel).
I've had seasonal allergies for decades and haven't seen them trend more intense, though some years have more allergens than others.
Personally I only take allergy medication maybe 50-100 days a year, and usually just a half dose. I have definitely heard from people with worse symptoms that they get a tolerance to medications so it may help to switch between them if you take them year round.
Not _necessarily_. I had big problems with pollen when I was a kid, but very rarely, these days (there seems to be _something_ that causes me difficulty for a few weeks a year, but that's more or less it now).
That is the general pattern but not always. I never used to have allergies and then developed them a few years ago. Was very miserable for a couple months every year for about 5 years but they disappeared again a couple years ago. I tried a few things like taking a spoonful of local honey every day etc. Ultimately I don't know what made the difference sadly but I haven't been bothered by seasonal allergies for several years now.
Yes I think the occasional attacks of pollen get worse, but in the long term I'm more used to it and I've learned habits to alleviate.
For example taking the right kind of antihistamines, taking them in the evening before bed, and most important regular cleaning.
Perhaps we can blame exposure to actual pathogens which resemble the pollen in some way, triggering a misdirected immune system response.
food is full of histamine, especially fish and fermented food which is considered healthy but some (MCAS, HIT) people are sensitive.
Trees react to climate change.
After droughts some release more pollen as a survival reaction
I kinda suspect it was the Covid. I didn’t have allergic reactions until I was infected with Covid. I don’t have proof though.
Covid fucked with people in various, not easy to measure ways. Some effects went away (like losing smell and taste, but it took months for me), some... not so much.
When I get cold/sneezing (the usual non-flu winter sickness) I cough much more since covid, more thick sputum created in the lower part of the throat. Talked with few people around and they confirmed they feel similar effects.
Allergies could easily be another area where effects can be subtle but permanent in some individuals. My father's hair got almost completely white after he almost ended up on ventilation for example. We as family with 2 kids (back then babies) had covid at least 11-12 times so far (confirmed by tests, wife is a doctor), plus few other probably-but-not-tested. Most recent one last autumn was like immunity went to 0 again, was coughing away nasty stuff for another month. I am glad I just survived all that, some of that was mild and some was pretty harsh on body and mind.
I had exactly the same experience. After I contracted Covid, until last year, it usually took me 2 weeks to stop coughing after the other symptoms went away. I think what improved the situation is exercise. I started to sprint walk a lot since last year and so far I haven’t had any long cough since then.
My son also got asthma after Covid. But he also improved when he grew a bit older (now close to six). We still give him the pumps whenever he had a bad cold, though.
Hope you and your family get better. It is very nasty. It is not life threatening but threatens pretty much everything else.
Spruce is also a problem in Poland, especially southern. Leaf trees have been replaced with "fast growing" spruce over a hundred years ago.
one one had Japan seem to have quite bad luck with the specific tree(s) mass planted
but also on the other hand in Germany problems with allergies are very common and a pretty big deal for many people, it's just that we got used to it
but also while Germany has not-very-diverse "tree farms" for a very long time, the level of monoculture got way worse in the last 70-100 years AFIK, especially after WW2 the only way to cope with the extreme high demand was to mostly plant very fast growing trees. I.e. mostly spruce and pine.
Idk. if allergies got worse due to this and we just didn't notice because of having so much bigger problems (like many cities lying in ashes) or if Germany always had similar bad allergy problems. But this WW2 induced increase in monoculture is still a huge problem even ignoring allergies as this made German forests especially susceptible to things like pests and adding stress from climate change has lead to mass dying of trees in some regions.
In Germany I understand the non-native trees in the warmer climate are succumbing to beetles, and dying out.
I understand that they're being replanted by more native species.
Yes true, especially the Harz mountains currently look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland (also visible on Google Maps), it will take decades to regrow with more diverse and climate resistant tree types, but worth it (compared to reforesting with another layer of fast growing trees of the same type).
Germany has half the percentage of forest as Japan
On average sure, but there are regions in Germany with both high amount of forest areas and fairly high population density (e.g. Ore Mountain region up to 50% forest area and more than 200 people/km^2).
Context:
Germany, area 357,022 km2 (137,847 sq mi) water 1.27%
Japan, area 377,975 km2 (145,937 sq mi), water 1.4%
My aunt in Poland has terrible allergies now because of yellow pollen from spruce, but I'm not sure how that translates to larger population, other than it does happen
Spruce allergy is a thing but it is rare. Only a few unlucky people suffer from it.
Pollen can be broadly separated into airborne and not-airborne.
Ragweed pollen is light enough to be borne miles by wind. Goldenrod pollen is too heavy for that, but is sticky, and is carried on fur and feathers. Ironically, people blame the showy goldenrod blooms for allergies, although they likely have never had goldenrod pollen in their breathing passages - while lowly, hiding ragweed unleashes millions of barbed pollens spores upon their breathing passages. (Ragweed flowers are small and green - you can stare at a plant and not realize it's blooming!)
Likewise: the sap of poison ivy is strongly allergenic; the sap of maple trees almost never, due to reactivity with immune systems. Americans are likely to be exposed to both.
So, in short: there are plants that are potential allergy-sources, and others that are not.
"why do you sneeze, we don't do that Germany"
Hayfever allergy rates are growing around the whole world, Germany included.
>Every year, an area is selectively clear-cut, removing sugi, hinoki but also other invasive species like bamboo. Broadleaf trees are left, and with more sun coming through to the ground, they grow back, along with other new seedlings either planted by staff or brought by birds or animals.
In other parts of the world, some plantation -> forest projects don't remove trees but instead pull them over and leave them as logs with exposed roots. This provides new habitats for various plants and animals around the logs and the gap in the canopy. I'm curious if they've explored the impacts that approach would have.
Japanese sugi forests are too dense. I don't think they have the space to lay these logs down.
A historically common way to clear certain kinds of areas in the US is to drag anchor chains with giant bulldozers. May still work?
In this case they're trying to leave broadleaf trees alone, so probably not.
Hmm, I'm also wondering about studies about overly sanitized environments for children being correlated with higher allergy rates.
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.
I'd like to preemptively draw a line between two different kinds of hypothesis when it comes to hygiene:
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."
Regarding the second point: ...or parasitic.
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.
IIRC there has been scientists looking at what substances and pathways the parasites, particularly the helminths family, might affect because the parasites have a evolutionary "motivation" to suppress immune responses, at least to some degree in the host.
What if the human body's response to external influences (including parasites) is nuanced and complex?
What if the very idea of "parasite" is overly redactive: maybe there are both advantages and disadvantages of having another organism in your internal biome, in varying amounts?
An excellent distinction to make. Life however often says "Why not both? And 11 more you'd have never thought of. And one that seems impossible just for fun."
If it's possible, and it can force a function up a gradient, life is almost certainly doing it somewhere.
You might even say it finds a way.
I wonder why we focus so much on this claim, when there are many studies giving other plausible explanations.
> Living less than 75 m from the main road was significantly associated with lifetime allergic rhinitis (AR), past-year AR symptoms, diagnosed AR, and treated AR. The distance to the main road (P for trend=0.001), the length of the main road (P for trend=0.041), and the proportion of the main road area (P for trend=0.006) had an exposure-response relationship with allergic sensitization. A strong inverse association was observed between residential proximity to the main load and lung function, especially FEV1, FEV1/FVC, and FEF25-75.
Effect of Traffic-Related Air Pollution on Allergic Disease: Results of the Children's Health and Environmental Research - PMC - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4446634/
> The most serious issue might be the growing trend in sensitization to pollen, especially in urban settings (7, 8); in fact, people living near heavy traffic are affected with pollen-induced respiratory allergies more than those in rural districts (9). The sudden rise in environmental pollutant levels due to industrial development and urban motor vehicle traffic has affected air quality and consequently, the severity and mortality from allergic diseases (10). Some evidence suggests that air pollution might cause new cases of asthma as well (9, 11).
Interaction Between Air Pollutants and Pollen Grains: The Role on the Rising Trend in Allergy - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5941124/
This doesn't mean that exposure to biodiversity doesn't play a role, but when it comes to explaining the differences between rural and urban settings, this explanation seems more plausible to me than the hand-wavey claims about people supposedly cleaning their apartments more in cities.
Personally, I have seasonal asthma associated with pollen, since childhood, and I'm from a big city.
I have a much harder time walking next to a busy road in allergy season than being somewhere more rural, even when there are birch trees right in the vicinity of where I am, one of my allergenes.
It's not b/w of course though, the pollen can trigger it not only in the city. But then it's usually very mild.
My asthma is seasonal, allergy-associated, and still, the worst stressor I experience is pollution and car exhaust. Well, the worst unavoidable stressor.
Alcohol also seems to do bad things to my allergy response.
I think you're correct.
I live off on a city side street off of a major avenue in my city. Diesel soot looks (other than color) and behaves like pollen. Next week i'll be cleaning the pollen and soot particles from my porch. I personally don't suffer from allergies too bad (just headaches during peak pollen release), but my wife really does.
When I grew up in NYC, i was too young to remember allergies, but I can recall cubbies for inhalers as many of my classmates had asthma. We happened to be downwind from the Exxon refinery and Greenpoint garbage incinerator.
It can go the other direction, too: exposure to moldy home environments gave me (now resolved) food sensitivities, dust allergies, pet-associated allergies, etc.
You can definitely undertrain, or overwhelm, the immune system if not cautious!
Don't underestimate the amount of cockroach debris present in a modern home. There's a positive correlation between asthma and in-home roach population.
Maybe some plywood cheap old US homes full of holes or crevices, but here in Europe if you have cockroach infection and not blind or similarly disabled, you know it. They are not exactly hiding in the evening/night.
I was surprised to not find anything about possible cures or treatments in the article.
I had bad allergies myself in my teenage years - unable to sleep for weeks - I finally sought help. The western medicine offers protein shots (similar treatment as to food allergies) but I heard good things about acupuncture. First, I was very skeptical about how needles could "help" with allergies. But about 2 months into the treatment (two sessions per week) the pollen season started. The air felt "heavy to breathe" but to my surprise I was not effected that year at all. After finishing the whole treatment I was allergy free for many years. Now I sometimes feel it on bad days with clouds of pollen hanging in humid air. My uneducated guess is, that my acupuncture treatment I received over 2 decades ago "wears off".
I wonder if others experienced similar or if I was a statistical outlier to a well shaped Gauss curve?
My understanding is allergies can be partially managed with placebo affect (as can mild colds!) and that is likely the reason it appears to work.
I live in Japan and developed an allergy to cedar pollen after I came. I started sublingual immunotherapy (a pill of concentrated pollen you dissolve under your tongue) three years ago and now can make it through the pollen season symptom-free. Supposedly you even keep the immunity after stopping the medication, though I have not tested that yet.
I was surprised to read that our allergies evolve, though perhaps I shouldn't have been. When I lived in the midwest of the USA, I hated mowing the lawn so much. I became a gunked-up mess with my sinuses packed with snot, regardless of antihistamines and (new at the time) allergy meds that presaged our present treatments.
I'd lived in the Bay Area for one or two months before a neighbor in my apartment complex knocked to ask if it was standard to not have an air conditioner in the residence (something that had surprised me as well). She said that keeping the windows open was aggravating her allergies and it was the first moment that I realized I could breathe easily through my nose. I don't know what grows where I grew up that isn't here, but getting away from it really changed my quality of life.
Severe allergies can be so intrusive that I'd consider moving out of the country if I was in the situation described in this article. But I only think that because I've experienced the effect of changing regions and experiencing a radically different outcome. If someone grew up with this being normal, they might never consider getting away. I certainly didn't think it could be better or worse if I lived someplace else.
"Evolve" doesn't well describe the very real possibility that you were/are more reactive to species popular in the Midwest, but not the Bay Area.
By "evolve", I thought you mean "change within the individual over their lifetime" - which also happens. I spent time in oxygen tents as a young child; I mostly suffer from (easily treated) sinus issues as an adult.
Also, our drugs have improved mightily, but that's obviously not relevant for an increase in allergies amongst the population (separate from the above meaning of "evolve").
Edit: I guess I'm not sure what you meant by the word.
“Arboreal sexism” is a similar phenomenon:
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.
That's not actually a thing. Very few trees we plant have specific male vs female plants. One of the few that does that gets brought up in this context, ginko, tends to have male trees preferred because the fruit kind of reeks. Ginkgo fruit is also toxic so you really don't want masses of it getting washed into local waterways in ecosystems the tree isn't native to - not a great time for the local wildlife. A significant supermajority of all the rest of the trees that you plant in cities are gonna have male and female flowers on the same plant or male and female structures within the same flower.
Cool, I did not know that this is so disputed a quasi factoid. Thanks for cleaning my brain!
Germany has “Baumkataster” which are databases for public trees in cities, they save all kind of tree metadata but gender is missing …
https://hub.arcgis.com/search?tags=baumkataster
I do think you mean sex, not gender - trees don't really have a gender or gender expression. Either way, it would be rather irrelevant, as most trees planted in cities have both male and female flowers (oak, birch, most conifers), or even hermaphroditic flowers (citrus).
thanks for this clarification. until today i was under the impression that they planted male trees only because they looked prettier and weren't as messy as the female ones (to reduce the cleaning bill of the local municipal)
TIL. Trees have (biological) sex. This just blew my head. I must have been too sleepy when we saw that in high school.
Interesting. I noticed that many people have hay fever in Japan, but I always just assumed it was genetic or something. I wonder if living there for a long time will make you more sensitive to pollen
As someone who has suffered from hay fever for my entire life, and also lived in many different locations, almost every move came with a 2-3 year reprieve from my symptoms while my body "discovered" the fun new local allergens.
Same.
It’s known that repeated exposure to allergens can cause allergic symptoms in people previously without them. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_fancier%27s_lung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer%27s_lung
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.
Poison ivy/oak sensitivity varies with lifetime exposure. On rare occasions, it is inverse: careful exposure can sometimes lead to resistance. More commonly: you get more sensitive over your lifetime, and some "once immune" people end up catastrophically changing due to incautious exposure.
It's complicated.
Yes. I developed hay fever after living here in Japan for a couple years. Was fine the first few years, though it was amusing to watch "yellow clouds of pollen" being blown from the trees with random gusts of wind. Now it's not so amusing. My car windows are dusted with a new layer of "light yellow" every couple days now (in season).
It's super easy to be allergic to cedar pollen because it is such a fine pollen. I developed a cedar pollen allergy within a couple years of moving from somewhere with no cedar to a heavily forested area with cedar. No other allergies to anything, I don't think I'm particularly prone. I tried doing the allergy shots for it for a while but it didn't seem to do much. What works is staying inside with the house sealed up and air filters running, or just getting the hell out of town for a month+.
Airconditioning 24/7 everywhere makes people weak is my theory.
AC are the bane for allergic people. It dries the air and flares the nostrils
Lots of people I know who moved here as adults have developed pollen allergies over the years. Some after a 2 or 3 years, some after 10.
I got hayfever on my 3rd year of living here, and it seems like quite a common pattern among immigrants I've noticed. I have hayfever back in the UK too, but I guess I didn't have a Cedar allergy - so it took time to develop.
I have been living in Japan for almost 8 years now, and I didn't have any allergy ever until a month ago when all of sudden it hit me like a hammer. Good god was it painful...
I'd been wondering why my allergies go nuts every time I visit Japan, but never really suffered in other Asian countries. Cool to know now.
Upside is I discovered the trick of just taking fexofenadine every single day which had the side effect of solving my chronic sinus infections.
My quality of life is notably better from daily fexofenadine vs what I think was low-level allergies that I developed in my 20s to pets, dust, etc
I would assume it has more to do with less exposition to hay/pollen in urban areas, for instance in years in Beijing I've had hardly allergies since it is not exactly green, though I went to parks, but here in Prague right now with everything blooming it's nuts.
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?
I think the humidity has to play a role in that. Very dry air is not good for the nose even without allergies. This year the spring is very dry and also quite cold in Central Europe which makes things worse.
[flagged]
Allergies are weird. I definitely became more sensitive to hay fever after a gastric bypass.
I have a friend who for no apparent reason developed strong allergies in their sixties. Particularly to goats milk.
So much so that they will not go to a restaurant that has goat milk products (e.g.: halloumi cheese) in their kitchen due to one too many visits to the hospital emergency ward.
While in Japan, I heard an urban legend that, it typically takes 5 accumulated years for a foreigner to acquire hay fever in Japan.
That more or less checks out, in my case. I think it started in like 4-5 years for me and it's absolutely terrible in Tokyo in the spring time. Thankfully I moved to Okinawa where they didn't plant those trees, or if they did there are much less of them.
Japan being 68% forest is an astounding stat.
Maine is 89.46% [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_cover_by_state_and_terr...
Yeah but Maine is not really known for miles of urban sprawl
Maine has less than a tenth of Japan's population density.
Sorry, I can't edit it now but I just meant it as a neat fact and not a comparison.
75% of it is mountains, and not exactly inhabited.
The nation has also had declining population (hence deflationary housing) for years
Still behind Finland (73.7%) and Sweden (68.7%) though and Laos (71.6%) as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...
I don’t consider that a good Wikipedia article because it does a bad job distinguishing between natural forests and mono-/bicultural plantations of which there are vast areas of here. It’s quite like calling wheat fields ”grasslands”. Both fundamentally lack biodiversity.
Not really for a mountain island. Being near the coast means increased moisture and wind, which hits mountains to make rain. Take a japanese-sized slice off the coast of most countries and you will find lots of forrest. Think the pacific northwest, or the bits of hawaii not covered in lava. Then compare parts of the australian coast with no mountains.
Would not count it as forest, but plantation, if it is heavily managed.
The Melbourne epidemic thunderstorm asthma event 2016: an investigation of environmental triggers, effect on health services, and patient risk factors
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
I first read about this in The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence by Gavin McCormick. Really good read.
wow 170 euros on amazon.de :/
So, is it 170€ good?
Doesn't pollen also have to do with the "gender" of the trees? In gendered trees, male trees emit pollen and female trees intercept pollen. Not all species of trees are gendered (dioecious) but various are. If reforestation uses male trees at the expense of female, then pollen count will be higher.
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.
Most trees (about 75%) contain both male & female flowers. Of the rest, about half are species with separate male/female trees and about half have separate male/female flowers (on the same tree).
The article makes the argument "there is a lot of pollen" and separately "there exist monoculture forests / tree farms" in Japan.
But what it doesn't do is:
1. Argue that the pollen is worse because of monoculture relative to polyculture forests (we could mix sugi and hinoki and...I assume net pollen would be the same?)
2. Argue that lots of pollen leads to more allergies. I mean, you might think that higher levels of exposure in childhood would lead to *fewer* people with allergies. So maybe a lack of forests in the past --> lots of people with allergies today? Why are the Japanese so allergic?
This article is bad and the author should feel bad.
>Argue that lots of pollen leads to more allergies.
With pollen, particulate size tends to matter. Pine tree pollen is very rarely an allergen because the pollen grains are huge, and I believe the body catches and rejects these pretty easily. Tiny pollen grains and ones with particular shapes can get much deeper in the lungs and aggravate things more easily.
estimated 43% of the population --wow
This article could have been summarized in three paragraphs.
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.
People like reading.
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.
I think its the same in Germany no? Heuschnupfen is something that got worse over the time and if i remember correct is as well related with some reforest project..
Only two types of tree? Even in the 1970's surely that should have been cause for concern.
This might have something to do with it:
> 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.
I don't get the relevance of "major cities grew rapidly". That can only mean that demand for wood spiked. There's no way it can cause local wood to become less competitive with imported wood.
It sounds contradictory but it often does. When a part of the economy booms, it may make other parts of the economy less able to keep up because they cannot increase profitability at the same pace (so people will seek jobs with larger salaries, or investments will go different ways). Moreover, increase of demand can drive seeking cheaper sources of a product, which then overtakes the previous ones due to being cheaper (while before this increase due to regulations or lack of certain network/supply chain it may not have been possible or profitable enough to seek these sources).
It does: Cheap rural workers could get better paying jobs in the cities so wages increased in rural areas to
If I had to guess - lumber costs might be dominated by labor costs? If they don't have guest worker programs it might not be cost effective anymore as wages go up
> There's no way it can cause local wood to become less competitive with imported wood.
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.
It required imported wood come what may, which opened up regulations and economies of scale that would have made importing wood expensive.
What about nuclear bombs? No effects from nuking cities?
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
I’ll bite: which ideology are you claiming believers in climate change are motivated by?
It wasn't smoke – it was AISLOP