Hey, It’s Hay Fever Season

I’m a hay fever sufferer. It varies with location and year, but I can always start to feel it right about now. It’s worse if I’m in a foreign country with unfamiliar pollen and spores. A few years ago, I spent a June weekend in Paris crippled by allergies. The only relief was to take a shower in our tiny hotel room.

Via Digg (curiously), here’s an article on the current thinking on allergies, and why we began to be so afflicted by them in the twentieth century:

To keep things in context, the term “allergy” was coined only a hundred years ago, and even then it was a very rarely diagnosed condition. Previous to that time, allergy sufferers were labelled “hyper sensitives”, and were fairly rare. There is no doubt that medical diagnosis has improved since 1906, and that some cases of allergies or asthma went undetected, but barring that, the occurrences of these maladies have increased exponentially in a century. By all accounts, we have only ourselves to blame.

The article also features a terrifying close-up photo of a hookworm.