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That pollen you see on your car might not be what’s making your eyes water and nose run, an Atlanta allergist told Healthbeat on Friday, the 10th consecutive day of “extremely high” pollen counts.
It’s pine tree pollen that coats Atlanta cars and windowsills in a sunny shade of yellow, but the pollens that fuel allergies here come mostly from hardwood trees like oak, birch, sycamore, and hickory, allergist Dr. Lily Hwang said. The spores are so small that you can’t see them with the naked eye – but many Atlantans are feeling them.
Nurses who are certified pollen counters at Atlanta Allergy and Asthma count the pesky pollen spores daily. The clinic is the only National Allergy Bureau-certified pollen center in Georgia. The nurses put slides of pollen under microscopes to count the tiny particles – and post the results online.
They add the tree pollen count to counts for grass and weed pollen – now mostly mugwort – to arrive at a total that changes daily. On Friday, it was 5616, mostly from tree pollen, up from just 33 on March 4, but down from 7067 on Wednesday. The count indicates “the number of grains of pollen or mold spores in a cubic meter of the air,” according to the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology, which certifies the pollen count station.
Measuring about 25 microns, much smaller than a human hair, tree pollen from hardwoods is “so small you really can’t see it by the naked eye. … The pollen that you don’t see are so small and so fine and so light, it actually is the one that blows around and travels further,” said Hwang, a Chattanooga, Tenn., native who started her career in internal medicine and got interested in allergies after seeing her young nephew struggle with symptoms.
Patients have different kinds of allergies, Hwang pointed out, so knowing the counts for types of pollens is helpful for deciding when and how to treat symptoms, especially since some medicines take two weeks to ramp up. In Georgia, pollen is more of a year-round problem, Hwang said, in contrast to Chicago, where patients get a winter reprieve.
For Georgians, the pollen season appears to be lengthening, Hwang said.
“If I looked at today’s count, I can see that the tree pollen is extremely high, and there’s not a whole lot of grass in the air yet .. grass season comes later in spring,” Hwang said. Meanwhile, weed pollen from mugwort is up this spring, while it’s typically seen in fall, due to warming.
“Our pollen is only going to get worse,” she said, adding that models predict an increase in severity and intensity until 2035. “They show that ragweed is moving more northward. We’re getting longer seasons. All these things are changing as we’re following them.”
The nurses at Hwang’s clinic also count mold, separately from pollen. That rate was also extremely high on Friday.
“Mold is spores that are found in the soil. They kind of are in the air …It’s not just like people think of mold, just like in their homes, but mold spores actually exist naturally, outside, as well,” Hwang said. “Ater the rain, you get nice warm weather. It’s a perfect situation for mold.”
Rebecca Grapevine is a reporter covering public health in Atlanta for Healthbeat. Contact Rebecca at rgrapevine@healthbeat.org.
