[I wrote this last year and e-mailed it to myself in order to have a full-length, non-political piece ready to post on a day like this one...]
Some time ago (January 9, 2013), the Kingsport Times-News printed a letter to an advice
column reporting an allergy issue: Someone “has a poodle,and she has not had any
allergy symptoms...She just bought another poodle and is highly allergic tothis
dog. Why is she allergic to one and not the other when they are the same
breed?”
The columnist replied, “The
issue...probably has little to do with dog allergies...I have seen so many
animals that were put up for adoption because a human... started to
sneeze or cough out of the
blue and the pet got the blame without the human member of the family seeking a
doctor’s advice.”
I’ll go further than that and suggest
that the most likely explanation is that this person is allergic to some
chemical the kennel used to control fleas, and will stop being allergic to the
new dog as soon as its coat has been completely shed and replaced. However,
there are other possibilities. So read on.
When I was very young, we spent one
summer in a swamp. The moldy basement had been freshly sprayed with chlordane,
which was legal in the United States at the time, to kill roaches; across the
street, other deadly poisons were regularly sprayed on the ground to control
grass. The house was roach-free and looked appealing but within ten hours after
going inside I developed asthma. I had asthma all summer.
I had never had asthma before. What
could be causing it? The popular wisdom of the time said, “Food, pollen, and
animal ‘dander’ trigger asthma.” I was eating the same kind of food I’d been
eating all my life. The only animals at the house in the swamp were slugs,
which don’t produce “dander.”. The local plant life was nothing new, either.
Maybe we were closer to some flower to which I hadn’t been exposed enough to
trigger an attack before. My parents looked at the new neighbors’ gardens. Aha! Jane Doe had a magnolia
tree. Magnolias are related to gardenias. I’d never had asthma before but I had
once sniffed a gardenia and sneezed for several minutes, as an infant.
One of Mother’s friends had sent home
a magnolia blossom, another summer. We’d kept it in the house for a day or two.
It hadn’t bothered me. “I don’t think I’m allergic to magnolias,” I wheezed.
“Let’s go and find out,” Mother said,
marching me to the Does’ front garden. “Go and sniff that big blossom right
there.”
So I sniffed it, and I sneezed. Of
course, it felt to me that if I’d taken a good sniff at anything, the way my nose felt,
I would have sneezed.
Anyway, the adults in my life wanted my allergy trigger to be magnolia
pollen. That was a simple solution. It meant I could spend the summer at home,
and then live in the house in the swamp during the school term when the
magnolia tree would stop blooming, and not have asthma.
This solution would have been so nice
from the adults’ point of view that it’s really a pity that it didn’t work. We
lived in the house in the swamp until February. Every afternoon my nose started
to clog up around 4 or 5 p.m. On school days my nose stopped running around
9:30 a.m. On weekends, if we went home I was fine, and if we stayed in the
house in the swamp my nose ran all day. Nobody had any further theories to
explain why.
Of course, we now know that although
allergies often seem to be triggered by food, pollen, and animal “dander,” and
although a person plagued with allergies may seem to react to dozens or
hundreds of substances in those categories, the primary causes of allergies are
likely to be mold and chemical pollutants.
I am not and have never been allergic
to magnolia pollen—which was fortunate a few years later, when that
sex-segregated dormitory my parents insisted on, at that church college, turned
out to have big magnolia trees growing right up against the windows. Not a
sniffle. I am mildly allergic to mold. I am extremely allergic to the poison sprays lazy
people use to kill weeds and roaches. (I’m also allergic to marijuana...how
common is that, and does it have anything to do with the slang words for
marijuana?)
The U.S. government finally wised up
about chlordane, which can no longer be legally sold in this country. While
living in the swamp I tested positive for the usual three or four dozen minor
food allergies, but “outgrew” all those allergies (except gluten and casein intolerance, as distinct from
allergies) as people used up their existing supplies of chlordane. I no longer
have asthma. What professional exterminators are now most likely to spray for
roaches are powders; the active ingredient is borax, which may or may not be
cut with cornstarch or sugar. None of these substances bothers me at all, so
it’s no longer likely that an exterminator’s visit might kill me. But it’s
still possible that an all-out attack on garden weeds might.
What about pets? The group of
young people collectively known as The Nephews have been forced to live without
a cat—oh, the cruelty of traps! oh, the stench of dead vermin in walls!—because
one little rotten-apple-in-the-barrel appeared to be allergic to cats. They weren’t
allowed to get out of the car while waiting outside their aunt’s home, either,
for that reason. Turns out my allergy-prone nephew is gluten-intolerant, like
his sister, his aunt, his grandmother, his great-aunt, his great-grandmother,
and so on all the way back into the mists of Irish history. When his diet was
corrected, he stopped having serious reactions to cats. One day when he’s old
enough that this test can’t be made into a custody issue, I’m going to invite
him to sit down on my front porch and pet a cat. Probably he won’t even sneeze.
When I was a child, my parents thought
it was ecologically correct not to keep a cat. (In an orchard, this is known as
Good Mousekeeping.) I bonded with my aunt’s cats when we visited her in
Florida. Mother thought I might be mildly allergic to cats, but it was hard to
tell, because I was severely allergic to Florida. At college, after the first
year in the dorm with the magnolias, I moved into a boarding house that had
cats and dogs. No problem. I bonded with all four animals, especially the
younger cat; I wasn’t really keen on the older cat’s habit of plopping down on
top of sleeping humans in the middle of the night, but neither did it bother
me...until one day in spring. Suddenly petting the cats made me sneeze. It
wasn’t the cats, of course; it was their brand-new flea collars. Still, even
after the flea collars had been removed, I couldn’t sleep if the cats had been
in the room for another month or two, and then I was still likely to sneeze or
itch if I petted their fur, all summer long.
Occasionally I still see hives forming
where cat hair has stuck to my skin on a damp day, or sneeze while grooming a
shedding cat. In the case of Cat Sanctuary cats, it’s definitely not because
they’ve been wearing flea collars. The need for flea treatments is greatly
reduced when (a) cats are mostly outdoors and (b) things on which they sit or
nap often are washed every few weeks and (c) the floor under their favorite
cushions on the porch, and under any nest boxes they accept for kittens, is
dusted with borax. When I’ve used flea powder, which has been seldom, I’ve been
able to find borax-based formulas that don’t seem to bother the cats or me. I
know that if I have an allergic reaction to a cat’s hair, it’s because the cat
has picked up a few mold spores or a bit of that irritating oil in poison ivy.
I know that another hair shed by the same cat, another day, probably won’t be an allergy
trigger. I wash hairs off me, vacuum them out of the house if necessary, and
cover up when I’m outdoors.
If you definitely have allergy
reactions to one animal and not to another animal of the same kind, you are probably reacting to some other allergy trigger that can be carried by an animal. Mold, pesticides, and soaps or flea treatments are likely to cause respiratory symptoms. Some pesticides are designed to soak
into an animal’s fur and make the animal an allergy trigger for a good long
time, but eventually your new pet will stop triggering your allergies. If
someone else is willing to bathe your new pet and comb or trim its fur, that
may help speed the process.
In another scenario that some
allergists think may be common, the animal doesn’t cause allergies but may dramatically aggravate them. Most animals mark their
territory with body secretions, which contain urea. Stachybotrys mold grows on most organic and
some inorganic substances, but it grows much, much faster on anything that
harbors traces of urea. Stachybotrys mold has been miscalled “toxic”
because it’s more likely to trigger more serious reactions than other
fungi...and so, while you’re not really allergic to your pet at all, you may
find yourself feeling allergic to everything and generally miserable, because
you’re allergic to the consequences of not scrubbing away every trace of
your pet’s presence in the house. After scrubbing everything, dehumidifying
your home, and moving your pet outdoors, you and your pet can live happily ever after.
Yet another common situation is
the one where the allergy sufferer is really reacting so violently to a
polluted environment, food s/he can’t tolerate, etc., that the person temporarily
seems “allergic to everything.” In this case, although the problem is
definitely not “just in the patient’s mind,” there is a psychological component
to the patient’s reactions. The more stressed, angry, or depressed the person
feels, the higher the level of exposure to the real cause of the problem, and
the more intensely the person will seem to react to something s/he might
otherwise be able to tolerate. If the predominant allergy reaction is asthma,
sniffing anything at all may cause sneezing and wheezing. If
it’s hives or skin rashes, prolonged contact with anything at all may make the rash break out. This
patient is reacting at least partly to something that’s already inside his or
her body, and anything at all can aggravate that reaction. You have
to feel sorry for this person, who is obviously miserable, and it is a good
idea for that person to separate himself or herself from anything that appears
to be a trigger...but don’t send the animal to a shelter! Once the poison has
worked its way out of the system, this person will no longer have allergies to harmless, natural things like animals or flowers.
A situation that’s not common, because
it’s so obvious, but I have seen it develop, occurs when animal
“dander” in the home reaches levels at which it becomes a mechanical irritant. Everybody coughs when they inhale enough dust to
block the intake of air. Everybody itches when they walk around covered
in dust. In houses where pets have been lounging on cushioned furniture and
carpets for years, any time anything stirs up the thick layer of “dander,”
anyone who’s in the room is likely to have these “symptoms,” and full-time
residents of the house may even get prescription medication to treat the
chronic irritation caused by living in...well, at that point, it has to be
called filth. Humans shed
“dander” too, more of it than smaller animals do, so decaying human skin and hair may be more to blame than animal
skin and hair. These people aren’t allergic to animals as such; they are sick
because they live in a sick, dirty environment. Cleaning is the cure.
And there are probably lots of other,
less common situations, not mentioned here, some of which a good allergist
might be able to recognize if anybody out there happens to be in one of them.
It’s definitely worth consulting an allergist before you abandon an animal.
