The worst of Anchorage’s allergy season may be over, two of Alaska’s only ‘pollen hunters’ say

Every spring, when the snow finally melts and the trees begin to bud, Bryan Farthing and David Kingston head up to the roof of the allergy clinic in Anchorage where they work to trap pollen circulating from trees and plants up to 300 miles away.

The two physician assistants, who work at the Allergy, Asthma and Immunology Center of Alaska, have spent hundreds of hours over the last seven years setting a trap for pollen and mold spores and analyzing the results beneath a microscope so they can warn the public what the various allergen counts look like that day.

The data they’ve gathered shows that this year’s allergy season has been particularly bad when compared to the previous two years.

A combination of high birch and poplar pollen counts has led to a high number of patients showing up at their clinic with miserable symptoms, including nasal congestion, itchy ears, itchy throats, “and more than usual compared to the last couple years is just lots and lots and lots of eye itching this year,” Farthing said.

During the last two years, birch pollen were lower than average, while this year, they are back to historically much higher levels, he explained.

“As of right now we’re seeing the cottonwoods, the poplars, the birch and alder and the spruce currently. No weeds or grass yet this time, and we’re seeing are pretty average amounts of molds that are outdoors right now,” he said.

The reasons why some allergy seasons are worse than others are complicated and hard to say with any certainty, Farthing said.

“We’ve worked with some other professionals in the state who have hypothesized that sometimes the winter freeze thaw cycles plays a role in pollination,” he said. “So we hypothesize that maybe climate change is having an effect.”

At this time of year, particulates in the air are also really high. Breakup season leads to lots of dust and dirt in the air that can affect even patients who don’t typically experience seasonal allergies, he explained.

According to Farthing, the process of setting the trap for the pollen, preparing the slides, counting and identifying the pollen they see, plugging those numbers into a spreadsheet that can give pollen estimates and publishing that data on the clinic’s website takes about 45 minutes to an hour — a process that Kingston and Farthing complete three times a week.

It’s become such a part of their routine that their co-workers have jokingly called them “the pollen hunters,” even though their main job is to treat patients suffering from allergies or asthma.

Without Kingston and Farthing’s work, most allergy sufferers in Southcentral Alaska would have no way of knowing that pollen counts were bad until their allergies alerted them.

Seven years ago, when the state ran out of funding to track pollen and the person who had been doing that job retired, the allergy clinic was gifted the expensive pollen trap from the state. When placed on about a fourth-story roof, the air sampler is able to slowly rotate about a millimeter an hour, trapping air and collecting samples of pollen circulating around Southcentral.

“Some pollen comes off the tree and goes straight down, but the rest of it kind of goes up, gets into the atmosphere, and mixes up like a washing machine,” Farthing said, explaining that pollen can travel hundreds of miles a day. “And then it kind of floats. And it’s catching what would be the average.”

“There’s an elegance to the process,” he said.

There’s just one other similar trap in Alaska where pollen is collected, counted and presented to the public. That’s in Fairbanks, at the Tanana Valley Clinic, which records its information online for allergy sufferers in the area as well.

Initially the clinic tried to partner with University of Alaska Anchorage students to help operate the trap, but samples collected near the university building off Tudor Road were too low to the ground and so close to busy roadways. High amounts of dust, dirt and other particulates in the air made the samples unusable, Farthing said. The clinic took over the project entirely shortly after that.

The good news for now is that the tree-pollen season appeared to have peaked last week, and pollen counts are slowly starting to decline, Farthing said.

Patients can typically experience allergy symptoms when pollen counts reach as little as 7 grains per cubic meter, he said. Anything above 100 is considered high.

“When it gets above 100 grains per cubic meter, especially if you have sensitive patient and allergies to those things that we’re measuring, they are much more likely to have a more severe response,” he said. “This season we’ve been for the last couple of weeks above 500 up to almost 1,000 grains per cubic meter.”

By this past Wednesday, that number had dropped down to 361, signaling that peak appeared to have happened already, Farthing said — likely around May 18 when counts hit 974 grains per cubic meter.

While the pollen peak signals some possible relief in the coming weeks, for much of May, tree pollen has been so bad that some of the clinic’s highest-risk patients — like the ones with asthma for whom seasonal allergies can act as a trigger for a potentially life-threatening asthma attack — have even had to leave the state to escape their allergies this year.

And no one’s out of the woods yet. After tree pollen peaks, weeds, grasses and molds spike, which means that until the snow falls again, allergy sufferers will likely continue to suffer, Farthing said.

Farthing said last week that he does the work pro bono because it feels like a public service. Being able to alert Alaskans with bad allergies that pollen counts are high allows them to take precautions like using a nasal spray or staying indoors. He’s also just passionate about pollen — the background image on his phone is a close-up of fuzzy, porous birch pollen as seen under a microscope.

For Alaskans suffering from bad seasonal allergies, he said his general advice was to try to avoid or minimize exposure to known allergies — for example, shutting windows in the morning to prevent tree pollen from entering, and rinsing hands and avoid touching eyes after being outside.

Over-the-counter antihistamines can help, as can over-the-counter nasal sprays.

“For those types of patients who are continuously having symptoms despite all this, or maybe they have in common and asthma and these need better control of multiple diseases, they typically matriculate into our office with a referral for more extended care, and that’s allergy immunotherapy,” Farthing said.

He said often, they recommend that patients take their over-the-counter medications as a precaution early on in the allergy season.

“A lot of times patients do better by pre-treating before the season comes,” he said. “So in the past, we’ve used tax day as an example of, start your nasal spray on tax day if you know you have a bad seasonal response to our birch season.”