<
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250410-how-climate-driven-thunderstorms-supercharge-pollen-allergies>
'People could see the thunderstorm, but they couldn't see what was going on
inside it. Trillions of pollen particles, sucked up into the clouds as the
storm formed, were now being splintered by rain, lightning and humidity into
ever-smaller fragments – then cast back down to Earth for people to breathe
them in.
It was around 18:00 on 21 November 2016 when the air in Melbourne, Australia,
turned deadly. Emergency service phone lines lit up, people struggling to
breathe began flooding into hospitals, and there was so much demand for
ambulances that the vehicles were unable to reach patients stuck at home.
Emergency rooms saw eight times as many people turning up with breathing
problems as they would normally expect. Nearly 10 times as many people with
asthma were admitted to hospital.
In total, 10 people died, including a 20-year-old law student who passed away
on her lawn, waiting for an ambulance while her family tried to resuscitate
her. One survivor described how he had been breathing normally and then, within
30 minutes, found himself gasping for air. "It was insane," he told reporters
from his hospital bed.
Paul Beggs, an environmental health scientist and professor at Macquarie
University in Sydney, Australia, remembers the incident well. "It was an
absolutely massive event. Unprecedented. Catastrophic," he says. "The people in
Melbourne, the doctors and the nurses and the people in pharmacies – they all
didn't know what was happening."
It soon became clear that this was a massive case of "thunderstorm asthma",
which occurs when certain types of storms break up pollen particles in the air,
releasing proteins and showering them on unsuspecting people below. The widely
dispersed proteins can trigger allergic reactions in some people – even among
those who weren't previously asthmatic.
Thunderstorm asthma events like the one that hit Melbourne are one extreme
example of how pollen from plants and the allergies it causes are being
dramatically altered by climate change. As temperatures rise, many regions –
especially the US, Europe and Australia – are seeing seasonal allergies affect
an increasing proportion of people, over a longer season and with worse
symptoms, say scientists.
This year, in the US, pollen levels are predicted to be higher than the
historical average across 39 states this season. And that is only likely to get
worse in the years to come, experts warn.'
Via Frederick Wilson II.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
