What is it about pollen that makes people sick?
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Pollen is tiny pieces of flying dust from plants. When you breathe them inn they get stuck in the lung and airways. For most people this just causes some iritation, sneezing and runny nose. However it is possible that the immune system identifies these pollen as a foreign infection and start actively fighting it. This is known as pollen allergy. In addition to the regular symptoms from pollen this also causes symptoms similar to a cold as the immune system tries to combat what it perceives as an intruder.
It’s a foreign substance that is small enough to travel through the air. The “sickness” from pollen allergy is our immune system improperly considering the safe pollen to be an enemy.
The immune system is our body’s defense force. It evolved in a time when we could get parasites from our food and water along with the risk of bacterial, fungal, and virus infection. Things were not very clean before civilization.
But with modern sanitation, we have removed many of the threats to our bodies so the immune system doesn’t have much to do. They still are anxious to eliminate anything foreign to our bodies. If one of them accidentally classifies a pollen particle as an enemy, any future pollen particles also are labelled as an enemy.
And when an enemy is detected, the immune system starts the full immune response by expanding blood vessels (swelling, redness) and increasing discharge to flush the system (runny nose, coughing). These are great for fighting infections but terrible on your body when facing harmless pollen!
Human immune systems are meant to be fighting a constant war. Before the modern era, parasites were basically a given. People would have worms and all kinds of nasty things crawling around inside them, feeding off of us.
In our relatively parasite free lives today, we still have immune systems geared up to fight an enemy that isn’t there. Imagine a nasty bar that needed brutal bouncers to keep customers in line, but the bar got rid of the bad customers and kept the bouncers. So you have these massive guys hanging around just waiting to beat the living daylights out of anyone who even looks like they might cause trouble.
That’s pretty much what’s happening with seasonal allergies. An over active immune system is protecting you from a non threat because it doesn’t have anything real to deal with.
There was a guy who had really bad allergies, so he went to Africa, walked around barefoot where people shit on the ground, and infected himself with hook worms. It cured his allergies at the small price of worms living in his intestinal tract and feeding on his blood.
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