Itchy eyes, sore throats, sneezing, congestion and many more symptoms: it must be said that pollen weather is very hard for many people.
Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
These respiratory allergies are a real public health problem. Even more destabilizing, in these times of a pandemic, their symptoms can be partially confused with those of COVID-19. How to convince the neighbor who settles down or tries to double his mask that it is the pollen that mistreats us much more than the virus?
Struggling with this condition, but also with allergies to all sorts of other things that rot children’s lives, many distraught parents try to find help in the hospital system. Unfortunately, the road to meeting the allergist and detecting the allergen responsible for the problem is not always easy. The demand for this type of treatment has exploded in recent years. In fact, we have been talking about the immune problems caused by allergens for several decades, which, it must be remembered, affect industrialized countries much more.
Those who have seen snow also know that we were much less concerned about these immune problems in ancient times.
What happened that people whose ancestors evolved for 99% of their existence in the woods, forests and savannahs displayed so many allergies to pollen? What happened to make pollen hurt us despite the fact that our Sapiens ancestors cohabited continuously with plants for nearly 300,000 years?
Biophilia is a concept invented in 1984 by American biologist Edward O. Wilson. What does it cause? Humans cannot have evolved for more than 99% of their existence in nature as hunter-gatherers and cut themselves off drastically without adverse consequences on their physical and mental health. So, tell this wisdom. Could this drastic cut with nature be the main explanatory element? Maybe we need to get Darwin out of his grave to ask his opinion on the subject.
There is a so-called hygienist hypothesis in the medical community that links our extreme cleanliness, shrinking family size, and lack of contact with soil and animal microbes to the increased prevalence of allergic, autoimmune diseases. and inflammatory. It is to a British doctor and epidemiologist named David Strachan that we owe this hypothesis born in the late 1980s. This doctor noted one day that the youngest of families suffered much less often from hay fever, asthma and other manifestations of allergy. He will then link this phenomenon to the qualitative health of the immune system. All parents can guess the presumed origin of this discrepancy. The first children to arrive in a family are often overprotected, as the parents project their own fear of germs onto them. So they sanitize everything around this precious baby and live in the constant stress of seeing him fall ill. When the baby has a little temperature, we run to the emergency room. A simple flu is enough to sow panic in the family. When the toddler drops his pacifier, it is thoroughly cleaned and disinfected before putting it back in his mouth. But with the second, the third and the rest of the siblings, all these fears fade away and the children are left to swallow the germs and strengthen their immune system.
Which was the norm in the old days, my mother would say. Today, when a child swallows a coin, she said ironically, we call the ambulance and go to the hospital! Formerly, the mother gave her a laxative to recover more quickly the change which she badly needed! According to David Strachan’s “hygienist theory”, growing up and living in a world without germs can cause immune disorders. It is therefore necessary, say more and more specialists, to allow children to reasonably come into contact with the microbes of the earth, plants and domestic animals. This is the best way to train their immune system to fight. Failing to offer them real adversaries, immune soldiers spend their time playing cards in the barracks. Without combat experience, they can start shooting peanuts, dust, pollen and other particles, with the consequences that we all know. In summary, this hypothesis reminds us that letting strangers into our microbial bodily diversity is a way to afford iron health.
But, the hygienist theory is not unanimous. Even today, some specialists do not adhere to the vision of Strachan, who involuntarily makes parents whose children suffer from allergies feel guilty. Beyond hygiene, other researchers believe, genetic predispositions, the much more sedentary modern lifestyle, pollution and even stress may explain part of the observation of the problem.
But let’s get back to hay fever, which affects nearly 15% of the world’s population, especially in industrialized countries. It took a long time for science to elucidate the causes of this condition.
For centuries, cold, heat, nervous and hyperactive temperament, dust, sun, humidity, ozone and even race and social class have been blamed for causing the common cold. hay or predispose to it.
Well before Strachan, in 1829, it was to the British physician John Bostock (1773-1846) that we owe the beginnings of what would become the “hygienist hypothesis”. By taking an interest in hay fever, this doctor found that this condition affected much less the poor and British farmers, who nevertheless lived in environments more likely to make them sick. He will conclude that hay fever only affected people of high or very high rank. Obviously, a disease that only affected the upper classes could only be noble. At least, that is how the British political elite, obsessed with race and social class, interpreted the discovery. Later, another doctor, William Roberts (1830-1899), took Bostock’s conclusion further by claiming that race and level of education were factors that predisposed to this disease. By a twisty path, Roberts came to the conclusion that only people of Anglo-Saxon stock got hay fever. Even in the United States, in Africa or in Asia, this doctor will add ideologically, the disease only affected people of “English blood”.
Obviously, in these times when the hierarchy of races, racism, racialism and British supremacism were uninhibited, a disease affecting only Anglo-Saxons could only be an honorable distinguishing mark. A snot before which the rest of the planet had to bow to the delight of the pseudoscientists in the service of racism which had given birth to social Darwinism, but also to eugenic ideology. So this is how hay fever became a story of civilization, a distinguished disease, an elite miasma and a sign of superiority of Queen Victoria’s mighty Britain. Nose in the air, wearing a drop of this noble nectar, we gloried in having hay fever to express our superiority over the rest of humanity.
It will therefore be necessary to wait until 1869 for an English homeopath named Harrison Blackley to demonstrate, thanks to a meticulous scientific protocol, that pollen was the main cause of hay fever. In doing so, he forced his compatriots to get off their high horses and take some for their colds. To learn that what we took as a sign of superiority came from an attack on his respiratory tract by the spermatozoa of plants, it deflates the ego of a Lord.