Like, is it when a small portion of a population has an adverse resction to something most of the species can handle just fine (i.e. a peanut allergy)? Or can it be a species thing? Like humans how get horribly itchy when the touch poison ivy, but other animal species eat the leaves and be just fine.
Would it be right to say that humans are allergic to poison ivy? If we’re not allergic, then is there another term for it?
Also, if it’s not an allergy, then where is the line drawn? I know there are a ton of people with pollen allergies, it seems pretty common. What percentage of the overall population makes an “allergy” a(n) [new term]?
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It doesn’t matter how many other individuals have the reaction. What matters is the reaction itself. An allergic reaction is your immune system attacking something that is *actually harmless*.
The chemical in poison ivy that causes the rash is not in itself harmful. Your body could just let it hang out. The rash is purely an overreaction of your immune system, which has decided that this was a chemical that should be attacked. It takes at least one prior exposure for your immune system to build up this allergy, and it can take multiple exposures (so that sometimes people think they are not sensitive to poison ivy because it has never given them a reaction, but then later in life they suddenly do get a rash after contact with it). .
Same with pollen. Pollen is not at all harmful in and of itself. But in some people, the immune system decides that it is the enemy.
So the key question for defining an allergy is: would this thing cause any harm if the immune system didn’t attack it? If the answer is *no*, then it is an allergy. (There can be some shades of gray. Like, some substances might be (inherently) mildly irritating to your body, but not actually dangerous. If the immune reaction to one of these is worse than the intrinsic irritation, then you can still call it an allergy. If the intrinsic irritation is worse than the immune reaction, then the immune reaction is appropriate as it reduces harm, and therefore it is not an allergy. Also, another part of the true definition of an allergy is which parts of the immune system actually get activated – e.g. which types of antibodies are produced.)
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