As if tornadoes and hurricanes aren’t bad enough, the weather can be dangerous in less obvious ways, affecting not only life and limb but also your health and well-being.
Your eyes are red and swollen, your nose is runny, and you’ve got the mother of all sinus headaches. They seem like classic cold symptoms but could just as easily be an allergic reaction. It’s been estimated that up to 20 percent of the population suffers from seasonal allergies, a collection of maladies that doctors call allergic rhinitis. This so-called hay fever usually strikes in spring and can last all the way through summer and into fall, generating an estimated ten million doctor’s office visits in the United States each year.
Grasses cause 30 percent of pollen-related health problems from spring through fall, but the primary offenders are weeds, which account for 60 percent of seasonal allergies. Ragweed is one of the worst: a single ragweed plant can produce a billion grains of pollen, each one smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
Allergic rhinitis can be traced to airborne pollen and mold spores, allergens that come from a wide variety of sources. Tree pollen accounts for only about 10 percent of allergies in the United States, striking mainly in late winter through spring. You may have awakened one morning to see a thick layer of yellow or green pollen on your car; it’s caused by pine trees and doesn’t generally trigger allergy attacks. The real culprits are particles of pollen from deciduous trees such as oak, maple, and elm.
Airborne pollen can travel for hundreds of miles, so pulling up all the suspected plants in your neighborhood may not solve the problem. Ragweed is so tenacious and bent on self-preservation that a dry summer will cause it to stop growing and put all of its energy into the production of pollen. If you suffer from seasonal allergies, close the windows of your home and use an air conditioner, which filters out pollen; dry your laundry in the dryer, not outside on the clothesline; and spend your time outside in the morning when pollen counts are lowest.
An even bigger menace is asthma, which affects nearly twelve million Americans and kills around five thousand annually. The most common type is allergic asthma, which is triggered by many of the same environmental factors as allergies. There is also exercise-induced asthma, thought to be caused by dry bronchial tubes, and infectious asthma, which begins after a viral chest infection. The fourth kind is occupational asthma, contracted when workers come in contact with an asthma-inducing substance on the job. Predictably, their symptoms are worse during the week but improve on the weekends.
The condition known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) also causes respiratory problems. The two most common forms of COPD are emphysema and chronic bronchitis. Emphysema is caused by a swelling of the lung’s air sacs, or alveoli. Once it occurs, the damage is irreversible. Chronic bronchitis is caused by irritation of the bronchial tubes over a long period of time, thickening their linings and creating shortness of breath and a predisposition to infections. Weather doesn’t directly cause COPD—smoking is the usual suspect—but cold air can cause symptoms to worsen.
In the 1960s, Dr. Joseph Hollander, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted the first controlled study of the weather’s effects on people with joint and bone problems. He built a barometric chamber where atmospheric pressure could be controlled, and moved in eight patients with rheumatoid arthritis and four with osteoarthritis. The twelve subjects lived in the climate-controlled chamber for two weeks, and during that time, only one person failed to respond to any weather changes. The seven other subjects found that their symptoms worsened 73 percent of the time when the chamber’s humidity was increased and the barometric pressure lowered, establishing a clear link between weather conditions and human discomfort.
Once the link between weather and pain was established, physicians and biometeorologists got to work on finding the causes. Robert N. Jamison, PhD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, explains that there are many possible mechanisms: “Because tendons, muscles, bones, and scar tissue are of various densities, cold and damp may expand or contract them in different ways. Sites of microtrauma may also be sensitive to expansions and contractions due to atmospheric changes. Changes in barometric pressure and temperature may increase stiffness in the joints and trigger subtle movements that heighten a nociceptive [injury-caused] response.”