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.
The 1962 Columbus Day Storm [1] fell 11.2 billion board feet of timber, which flooded the market and initiated heavy overseas demand. Exports peaked in the 80's. But when the export levels fell and old growth timber became more scarce, local economies of exporting regions took a big hit. The port of Coos Bay for example had a big downturn with lumber being the primary cargo of ships. Coos Bay is the only deep-water coastal harbor in Oregon and the largest between San Francisco and the Puget Sound.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_storm_of_1962
by the time the 10-20 year timeline finished, situation changed enough for the plan to not be followed
Not familiar with the biology of the matter. But I would assume there are advantages and disadvantages to the weight of the pollen in how it disperses and pollinates.
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.
After droughts some release more pollen as a survival reaction
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 grew up in a tropical country and never ever had any allergies in my life but in Berlin if I step outside with taking anti-allergy pills, that would be the death of me
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.
Germany, area 357,022 km2 (137,847 sq mi) water 1.27%
Japan, area 377,975 km2 (145,937 sq mi), water 1.4%
I understand that they're being replanted by more native species.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If it's possible, and it can force a function up a gradient, life is almost certainly doing it somewhere.
> 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 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.
You can definitely undertrain, or overwhelm, the immune system if not cautious!
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?
There is. Sorta
Maybe acupuncture could work through the same mechanism?
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.
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.
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.
Germany has “Baumkataster” which are databases for public trees in cities, they save all kind of tree metadata but gender is missing …
Some plants do this by activating the male and female parts of their flowers at different times, but this strategy is way stronger.
Some species, in some ways. It's varied and complicated
See: Monoecious, dioecious & hermaphroditic plants
https://plantura.garden/uk/green-living/knowledge/monoecious...
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.
It's complicated.
I have allergies to ragweed and didn't have spring allergies before that. Now back in the US and have spring allergies as well.
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?
Unfortunately, I heard that the government previously investigated taking action but were lobbied against doing so by pharmaceutical companies that earn revenue from allergy medications.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_cover_by_state_and_terr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...
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.
Then one day he noticed that the mayonnaise he enjoyed every day contained a conservation additive (an E-type, as is how they're labelled in Europe) which he knew he used to have some reaction to in the past, another food product included it and he had avoided that one since like forever. So he quit the mayonnaise when he noticed that. But what happened next was astonishing - all his allergies, lactose intolerance and everything disappeared, and not much later he didn't have any issues with anything.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
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.
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.
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.
A monoculture forest releases all its pollen at once, instead of a fraction of it always being in flower throughout spring/summer.
> 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.
In my area, there are a lot of trees that make my life hellish when those plants pollinate. The other day I thought I was coming down with a cold. Nope, just really bad allergies.
It's odd the BBC chose to anchor on Japan when it's really a widespread issue.
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.
Hope you enjoyed it, no need to thank me.
