Word: pollens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nature intended, the sheer number of pollen grains -- the botanical bearers of sperm -- ensured that at least some would reach and adhere to their natural goal: the stigma, a moist and sticky receptor of the female organ of the flower. That would start a fertilization process eventually resulting in seed and the propagation of the species. As a result of one of nature's oversights, however, many of the pollen grains reached another moist and sticky target first: a human eye or the mucous membranes of a nose or bronchial tube, where they set off a chain of events with...
...been hell," says Mari Cox, 37, a medical assistant in Kansas City, Kans. A wet spring and wind in the region have whipped up pollen counts, so debilitating Cox that she hasn't been gardening -- her hobby -- or even playing with her five kids. Instead she is lying low, taking antihistamines and decongestants. "I'm miserable," she says...
...Fire Island beach near New York City, weekenders are peacefully sunbathing when the wind suddenly rises, blanketing them with swirling clouds of pollen. Coughing, wheezing, their eyes tearing, some of the bathers beat a hasty retreat from the beach. "It was just like yellow smoke," says an awestruck city dweller...
What has improved is scientific understanding of the mysterious chain reaction that causes tiny pollen grains to make a human being miserable. Fresh insights into the process, combined with the new techniques of molecular biology and genetic engineering, offer hope that this plague will someday be brought under control...
That is little comfort, however, in this excruciating season of sniffles, which will not fade until ragweed -- the antagonist that may claim more victims than any other plant -- stops flowering in the fall. There is no precise way to measure how bad an allergy season is, since pollen counts are notoriously unreliable and as variable as local weather. But in the East, where spring was unusually concentrated this year, some readings have gone off the charts. At this time in 1991, Robert Hamilton, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, generally measured 1,000 to 2,000 pollen grains...