Your eyes water, your nose drains, your skin itches, or you are in general misery. If you suffer from any, or all, of these, you are feeling the effects of an allergy. For the most part, allergies are not much more than a discomfort or a nuisance from time to time. But in some cases they can be devastating - making you very, very sick, and even cause death.

I don't know about you, but I get the impression that allergies are a relatively new thing. As a youngster, I don't think I knew more than two or three people who suffered from some form of sensitivity. I can think of a man who sneezed repeatedly when exposed to certain forms of dust, and a cousin whose nose would become stuffy under certain conditions. Later on, I had a friend who worked on a sugar estate and suffered stuffiness at crop time when the stalks were being cut, releasing clouds of fungal spores. I can recall having swollen lymph glands after being stung by bees - not all the time, but only after the bees had sampled certain flowers, which I haven't been able to identify.

Nowadays, the condition is much more common - widespread in some societies. Allergies are generally more prevalent in the developed, industrial countries than in the poorer, more agrarian ones, and within countries, allergies are found more often in the built-up areas than in the country.
But just what is an allergy anyway? By definition, it is abnormal sensitivity to ordinary substances. Scientists, who are able to describe intricately how the body overreacts to a wide range of substances, are still not able to offer a definitive explanation of why this happens. When the body is exposed to mould, pollen, solvents, spores, skin or hair shed by animals, the immune system can go into overdrive, flooding the bloodstream with antibodies specific to those substances. The antibodies in turn cause the white blood cells to produce chemicals such as histamines.

They send mucous membranes into frantic action, flooding the nasal passages and causing the familiar runny nose. They can cause the already small airways to constrict, causing stuffiness and difficulty in breathing. They stimulate tissues to swell, the skin to itch, and the tear glands to produce more than the normal quantity of tears.

In severe cases, exposure to even a trace amount of a particular chemical can send the body into anaphylactic shock, affecting several organs and even causing total failure. This frightening possibility has led to hyper-sensitivity of a different sort among parents and public officials in many countries. In many parts of North America and Europe, for example, children can't take peanut-butter sandwiches to school or daycare because these products can cause a serious reaction among a small minority of their playmates.

The prevalence of allergies has put an extra burden on those who prepare food - they have to bear in mind that some seemingly innocuous items can seriously affect some diners. During Christmas dinner last year, a young relative, after taking one bite of a stir-fry, exclaimed that it contained almonds, to which she was allergic. Another woman of my acquaintance can't drink red wine because it makes her lips and eyes swell. A couple I know have wood floors throughout their house - the chemicals which "outgas" from carpets, together with dust, trigger allergic reactions.

The most dramatic example I know of is a former colleague who developed what the medical people call multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome. It began many years ago, in the days before smoking was banned in public buildings in Canada. She sat across a desk from a colleague who smoked strong, unfiltered cigarettes. He regularly filled a huge ash tray with half-burnt butts which produced a strong smell. By the time the ban came she had also developed a reaction to perfume and cologne worn by others. It got so bad that she had to quit work on disability, and throw out all the conventional items in her home. She had to find things like benign soap and detergents and special non-irritating varnishes to seal flooring and furniture from the chemicals which leach out over the years in small quantities that don't affect most of us. At one point she even had to walk around with a bottle of oxygen to ease the burden on her poor, overworked lungs.

Researchers offer an explanation that because of the thousands of new chemicals pouring out of laboratories and circulating in the environment, along with the stuff we pour into the air and water each day from our motor vehicles, factories, farms and sewer systems, it's no wonder that allergies have become so prevalent. This, I imagine, is the price we have to pay for "progress".

Printer's devils, glitches and such:
Last week, I quoted an old proverb as "Wilful waste brings hopeful want". It should have read "Wilful waste brings woeful want", as was seared into my mind from hearing my mother invoke it whenever any of us children transgressed.
The week before, I discussed the huge area of plastic waste in the Pacific. A sharp-eyed reader noted that I had made the area much bigger than it was. The gyre, as the area of slack water is known, is even bigger than the figure I quoted, but the patch of plastic trash it contains is smaller. Even then, the experts disagree about its size. Some compare it to the US state of Texas, others say it's 1 1/2 times the size of the United States. Regardless, it's a huge problem that no one knows how to deal with.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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