Air Pollution and the Allergy Epidemic

As I sit here, my work occasionally interrupted with spasms of sneezing, or more often, the I'm-about-to-sneeze-but-really-don't feeling which causes me to waste a minute with my face unnecessarily buried in a kleenex ... my thoughts turn to why I have allergies, or for that matter, anyone does. Allergy rates have been on the rise, doubling in the last 30 years with seemingly no explanation...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-08-07-allergy-sensitivity_x.htm

When the medical community is coming up with "explanations" as half-assed as the idea our children are raised in environments that are too clean for their immune systems to be "primed" by exposure to bacteria... you know they're just grasping at straws. (Anyone who's ever been around a baby or toddler will know first-hand they never stay clean for long!) Seriously, blaming the parents of all allergy sufferers for scrubbing the floors and cleaning the sheets? Oh yes, let's just forget the reasons we started cleaning in the first place. It's obvious if only we all had more fleas, bedbugs, head lice, athlete's foot, and hepatitis... we'd all be so much healthier we'd never be allergic to anything!

But for me, there is no mystery... it's all from air pollution. Carbon dioxide is good for plant growth, remember? Well it turns out studies have been made linking increased CO2 levels to pollen emissions from plants... including the infamous ragweed.

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=9163&page=1

Give the plants more CO2 in the air and they'll take advantage it to produce more pollen. Right now, pollen counts are at ridiculous highs they never were when people first started counting. So as the symptoms of me and my fellow allergy sufferers get worse year after year, as asthma rates continue to climb at risk to human life... I can't help but wonder how few people have made this simple connection between the changes in atmospheric chemistry and human health. Simply put, allergies are worse than they were a hundred years ago, because our immune systems never had to put up with so much pollen before!

Many of the people who believe that global warming isn't man-made go on to say we could burn as many fossil fuels as we wanted to, dump as much carbon into the atmosphere as we can... look how silly we were for worrying so much! ...except even if mainstream science and the people like me who still believe in it are completely wrong, emitting more carbon into the air is still detrimental to human health.

I can't help but wonder if there's someone typing up a post on his blog right now about how "Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Lie!" in-between bouts of sneezing and coughing and puffs on his inhaler... never really sinking in he's asking the rest of humanity to further degrade his air supply.

The point is, global warming aside, we need to reduce our CO2 emissions... before asthma and allergies climb to be the top cause of death.