Hay fever, the deadly allergy – Beragampengetahuan

Here in the UK, it seems we barely left the cold and dark days of winter behind, but we are only a couple weeks away from the start of hay fever season. In the UK, tree pollen occurs from late March to mid-May while grass pollen occurs from mid-May to mid-July. Taken together, hay fever affects about one in five people in the UK but according to a global study, half the people in Brazil or Australia suffer from it. I have been lucky for most of my life and have not had any hay fever, but over the last ten years or so, I think I have developed a mild case because I experience the typical symptoms every April.

Hay fever season in the UK

Source: Dyson

Time then for a PSA, because, well, you wouldn’t believe how dangerous hay fever is.

Ok, hay fever isn’t as dangerous as cancer or other diseases and to my knowledge, there has been no reported case of a person being so allergic to pollen that they died from inhaling them. But what happens is that people with hay fever sneeze more often, and have teared up eyes and other symptoms. And if you are operating heavy machinery (such as, say, a car or a jumbo jet) sneezing can lead to accidents.

Similarly, if you are a construction worker, a lumberjack, or a social media influencer about to do another planking stunt (or whatever the latest idiocy promoted on social media is), the risk is that you may slip and fall because you can’t see properly. Finally, there are tons of other inventive ways to seriously hurt yourself because of your hay fever.

Mika Akesaka and Hitoshi Shigeoka were the first economists who tried to estimate how many accidents and deaths are caused by hay fever. To do this, they combined the pollen count from weather stations all over Japan with the records of ambulance calls between 2008 and 2019.

This allowed them to statistically analyse how many more accidents and deaths there were on days with high pollen concentration in Japan compared to average days. The chart below shows that on days with higher pollen counts, accidents become more common. On average a 10% increase in pollen count leads to 23,100 added accidents in Japan. Out of these 7,900 are traffic accidents, 1,200 work accidents, 700 sports injuries and 600 fire accidents, etc.

Pollen count and accidents per million Japanese

Source: Akesaka and Shigeoka (2023)

One has to wonder what cost hay fever creates for the economy because of all these accidents. Or rather one doesn’t have to, because in the study they do that calculation for us. Akesaka and Shigeoka estimate that the total annual cost from a 10% increase in pollen count to the Japanese economy is some $2.9bn.

And that is just a lower bound. After all, hay fever leads to loss of productivity and sleeplessness, all of which create additional costs to the economy that are not included in these numbers.

But whatever the cost, now you know that hay fever is an incredibly dangerous condition, and we should all be on guard in the coming months for people with hay fever. It’s going to be dangerous for them and everyone in close proximity to them.

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