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Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

bbc.com

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Re: Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

#91

Post by Spooky23 »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #89
dv_dt wrote: post #24

Hmm, I'm also wondering about studies about overly sanitized environments for children being correlated with higher allergy rates. 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…

I wonder why we focus so much on this claim, when there are many studies giving other plausible explanations. > 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…

I think you're correct.

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.

Re: Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

#92

Post by goda90 »

>Every year, an area is selectively clear-cut, removing sugi, hinoki but also other invasive species like bamboo. Broadleaf trees are left, and with more sun coming through to the ground, they grow back, along with other new seedlings either planted by staff or brought by birds or animals.

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.

Re: Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

#93

Post by IrishTechie »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #60
efesak wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spruce and other local conifers (I live by the Bohemian Forest/Bayerischer Wald) have pollen that seems to be low allergenic by design. I know a lot of people who are allergic to birch or weed pollen, but not to spruce.

By design? Who designed the pollen in those trees?

I guess they meant 'by nature', but maybe not, which will be fun to hear!

Re: Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

#94

Post by bschwindHN »

crvdgc wrote: post #77

While in Japan, I heard an urban legend that, it typically takes 5 accumulated years for a foreigner to acquire hay fever in Japan.

That more or less checks out, in my case. I think it started in like 4-5 years for me and it's absolutely terrible in Tokyo in the spring time. Thankfully I moved to Okinawa where they didn't plant those trees, or if they did there are much less of them.

Re: Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

#95

Post by INTPenis »

the_af wrote: post #85
INTPenis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes timotej is my allergy as well. 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 n…

Once you get sensitized, it gets worse every year, right? Since my teenage years I was mildly allergic to pollen, and now in my adulthood it seems to be getting progressively worse. Each spring is worse than the previous one, and the antihistamines do less effect (or so I subjectively feel).

Yes I think the occasional attacks of pollen get worse, but in the long term I'm more used to it and I've learned habits to alleviate.

For example taking the right kind of antihistamines, taking them in the evening before bed, and most important regular cleaning.

Re: Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

#96

Post by pixl97 »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #80

The article makes the argument "there is a lot of pollen" and separately "there exist monoculture forests / tree farms" in Japan. 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 o…

>Argue that lots of pollen leads to more allergies.

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.

Re: Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

#97

Post by alsetmusic »

I was surprised to read that our allergies evolve, though perhaps I shouldn't have been. When I lived in the midwest of the USA, I hated mowing the lawn so much. I became a gunked-up mess with my sinuses packed with snot, regardless of antihistamines and (new at the time) allergy meds that presaged our present treatments.

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.

Re: Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

#98

Post by zahlman »

timschmidt wrote: post #68
Terr_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to preemptively draw a line between two different kinds of hypothesis when it comes to hygiene: 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 pr…

An excellent distinction to make. Life however often says "Why not both? And 11 more you'd have never thought of. And one that seems impossible just for fun." If it's possible, and it can force a function up a gradient, life is almost certainly doing it somewhere.

You might even say it finds a way.

Re: Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

#99

Post by zeristor »

flohofwoe wrote: post #14

Hmm, most German forests are also vast monoculture 'tree farms' and have been for the last 250 years (also caused by large scale deforestation in the centuries before). In the Ore Mountains we also have those yellow clouds of pollen coming off spruce trees every few years, covering everything with a thin yellow dust layer, yet I'm not aware that the number of people with pollen allergies is exceptionally high (oth, m…

In Germany I understand the non-native trees in the warmer climate are succumbing to beetles, and dying out.

I understand that they're being replanted by more native species.

Re: Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

#100

Post by simiones »

niemandhier wrote: post #81
vikramkr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not actually a thing. Very few trees we plant have specific male vs female plants. One of the few that does that gets brought up in this context, ginko, tends to have male trees preferred because the fruit kind of reeks. Ginkgo fruit is also toxic so you really don't want masses of it getting washed into local waterways in ecosystems the tree isn't native to - not a great time for the local wildlife. A signifi…

Cool, I did not know that this is so disputed a quasi factoid. Thanks for cleaning my brain! Germany has “Baumkataster” which are databases for public trees in cities, they save all kind of tree metadata but gender is missing … https://hub.arcgis.com/search?tags=baumkataster

I do think you mean sex, not gender - trees don't really have a gender or gender expression. Either way, it would be rather irrelevant, as most trees planted in cities have both male and female flowers (oak, birch, most conifers), or even hermaphroditic flowers (citrus).
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