By James Rincon

Pflag Reporter

Central Texas seems to have turned the corner past the cold days of winter and ushered in spring with a riot of blooming trees and flowers that paint its fields and roadsides wild shades of green, blue and yellow.

Before residents start soaking in their summer tans, they too are sporting the color of the season – red, on their itchy eyes and tissue-tortured noses. It’s allergy season, and experts are saying this one’s a doozy.

“We’ve been having a busier year than last year definitely,” said Dr. Veena Rajashekhar, allergist and owner of AAHCHOO! allergy clinic in Round Rock. “Patients have congestion and severe eye trouble, from eyes completely swollen shut to just watery and itchy.”

One need only look at the hood of a white car that’s been sitting out on a sunny day to finger the culprit of the coughs and congestion. The fine yellow pollen that dusts the landscape is abundant after three months of above-average rainfall.

“After coming out of two years of drought and extremely hot temperatures we had this extremely wet fall and spring and the trees are just in prime reproduction mode and that’s what pollen is … it’s tree sperm,” city Arborist April Rose said.

Rose said that the stress of drought conditions triggers a self-preservation mechanism in flowering plants that amplifies their reproductive output when the rain finally falls.

“They start to go into survival mode, meaning they’ll start to do whenever they can to propogate their species,” Rose said.

The pollen poses no real danger, but people with allergies react to the airborne intruders as if their lives depended on it.

“What pollen is doing is causing the body to react in a way that it’s thinking that the pollen is almost like a poison,” Dr. Rajashekhar said. “It’s making mucus, it’s making cough, it’s making so the body can stop those particular irritants from getting into the body. But what the body doesn’t realize is this pollen isn’t really a poison, it’s something the body shouldn’t be worried about. It’s overreacting to what’s in the environment.”

The Pflugerville pollen count has been classified by weather.com as either high or very high for the last month and a half, as grass, oak trees and cedar trees in the area wreak havoc of sensitive sinuses. The city sits in the Blackland Prairie where the traditional terrain doesn’t foster much foliage, however, Rose said Pflugerville’s three creek corridors and their tributaries are prime grounds for native trees such as elms, pecans, ash junipers and cedars.

“Elms and pecans and cedars all do produce pollens that produce allergic reactions,” Rose said. “We (the city) plant oaks, elms, ash trees, a variety of things that are going to do well in this region. People really love the oaks and the elms and the ash, some of the other shade trees that we favor, and when I say oak – there are 30 different kinds of oak. From within the spectrum of oak we plant lots of different ones.”

So what can seasonal sufferers do to find relief? According to Dr. Rajashekhar, there are several lines of defense against ubiquitous irritants.

“Some of the less expensive things people can do if they do believe they have allergy are, once they come inside from outside wash off with a washcloth and get the stuff out of the hair. If you think you might be allergic to your animal wash them down before you let them in the house. Don’t let them into the bedroom. Have a good ac unit filter. Keep car windows rolled up with AC on,” Dr. Rajashekhar said.

Since there is a large range in severity of the many symptoms associated with seasonal allergies, Dr. Rajashekhar said sufferers should seek medical treatment at the point allergies affect the quality of their lives.

“I get a lot of parents who bring in their kids because they’re disturbing their classmates if their clearing their throat a lot or they cant do their activities like the other kids. Sometimes the allergy might have progressed to an asthma with that,” she said.

Dr. Rajashekhar said over the counter treatments work well for some and don’t work for others. Others still are more affected by the side-affects of OTC treatments than they are by their allergy, including some nasal sprays that warn of potentially serious side effects such as perforation of the septum if use is prolonged.

“One thing that we’ve found when you have to buy (treatments) over the counter is if you actually add up how many pills you have to take, its probably very similar to how it is when you have to buy the prescription ones.” Dr. Rajashekhar said.

Some allergies can even be prevented with a series of shots that desensitize the body to irritants.

“In children we’ve shown in studies that we can prevent the progression to asthma if we get started early enough on those injections and we know what they’re allergic to, because we can change the immune make up,” she said.

Wet spring days will continue to foster feverish levels of pollen production this season. As the summer sets in there will be new weeds to worry about, however, that doesn’t mean Central Texans are condemned to walk the streets with faces like Stallone at the end of Rocky.

“We have such good therapies now and most of them are covered under insurance,” Dr. Rajashekhar said. “Don’t feel like you have to suffer.”