Announcing the Pollen API

Solar I sort of get since I don't think anyone does it the scale like Google Sunroof, but not sure what the added value is for Google to create the APIs for Air Quality and Pollen? There are service providers and models that do these already at global scale (e.g. https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/air-quality & https://silam.fmi.fi/).

Some allergies are triggered by a disease[1]. It is possible that hayfever is an outcome of a disease which has become common since 1819. The disease may have no other symptoms, and hay fever a symptom in only some people, and therefore be very hard to track.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/p0727-emerging-tick-...

According to Wikipedia [0], Hayfever was already described in the 10th century. It is less common among people who grew up on a farm and more common with rising temperatures and air pollution. Hayfever is also significantly more common in urban areas.

Assumably all of these factors play a role in the prevalence today, though that doesn't rule out the existence of other undiscovered factors (e.g. a disease, as some people speculated).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allergic_rhinitis#History

There was a very interesting discussion recently on this topic. [1]

There are various hypothesis:

* changes to gut microbiome composition due to modern diets and overuse of antibiotics

* excessive cleanliness and hygiene. The "hygiene hypothesis" suggests that lack of exposure to diverse microbes leads to improperly trained immune systems

* increased exposure to chemicals, plastics, and pollutants that may disrupt immune function

* Cesarean sections and formula feeding rather than vaginal birth and breastfeeding

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37195905

Exposure, especially kids. Also food it I had to guess.

It seems that we are shielding ourselves ever more from exposure to nature. Which has tremendous benefits, but allergies seem to play into that.

As for food, I have now seen too many people cure themselves from hayfever and other allergies by ditching carbs, or other significant dietary changes. No accident if you ask me. And would line up somewhat with industrialization of food production post 1800 or so.

In addition to other answers, I’d speculate there’s no strong negative selection against moderate allergies. There might simply be no evolutionary disadvantage to being slightly itchy and having running nose for H.sapiens.

People often plant more male than female trees in cities to avoid having to pick up fruit, which perhaps doubles the pollen load. So it's a cultural problem that overlaps with the homelessness crisis, because the status quo applies pressure to keep everyone working within the system to feed themselves rather than adopting stuff like permaculture and no-till agriculture.

Also the immune system can get confused by two or more simultaneous stressors. So maybe a child has a cold while pollen is present, and develops too many antibodies to the pollen. I saw an animation once showing a normal immune system destroying cells covered in viruses. Then it showed a confused immune system destroying cells covered in allergen molecules. Which releases histamine and triggers a positive feedback loop. Multiple triggers may also be a root cause of many cancers, which can be thought of as autoimmune disease in the extreme. So for example, rheumatoid arthritis responds to methotrexate the way cancer does. Western medicine is often blind to this because it's too hard to do root cause analysis without large epidemiological studies, which are funded through the government and vulnerable to anti-government spending sentiment. Nobody wants to pay for it so we self-medicate rather than solving the underlying mystery.

In my case, I never had seasonal allergies until I was about 11-12, when my elementary school sprayed broadleaf herbicide to kill the dandelions. By coincidence, a family friend had me mow a lawn overtaken by dry cheatgrass, and all I had was a weed eater, so I was out for hours breathing the dust. From that day forward, I had flu-like symptoms for the entire month of May in my hometown, until I reached about 40 and grew out of it. I believe that the herbicide was the second stressor. So my quality of life was impacted by someone else's judgment call which categorized dandelions as weeds instead of, say, bee food. I finally found peace with this when I realized that saving the life of a child who is deathly allergic to bee stings is worth the other students suffering a lifetime of allergies.

I feel now that all questions that seem unanswerable, even with our considerable economic advantage, speak more about our cultural failings than our technological limitations.

> Has anyone yet figured out why so many humans suffer from an allergy to many natural plants which we have lived around for millions of years?

For those of us in the Americas most of us aren't living in the same places our ancestors lived for millions of years and so are living around a different set of plants than humans evolved with.

For example I've lived all my life in the western United States, about 30 years in California and 30 years in Washington.

According to DNA testing I have very little Native American ancestry, so it is very likely that almost all of my ancestors from more than around 300 years ago were not from here. The DNA tests say my ancestors were almost all British and German, so almost all of my ancestors from 600 or more years age weren't even on the same continent that I am.

How many generations does a population have to live in a new area before they adapt sufficiently so that the native plants don't give them allergic rhinitis?

As time passes it feels like Google slowly morphs into a Hooli-esque enterprise. Google's corpspeak has become insufferable...

It's such a ridiculous statement that without context you'd have thought it was a parody of corp speak.

Yep, and the Breezometer homepage now redirects to Google’s map platform page (subpages still seem to work, such as https://www.breezometer.com/air-quality-map/air-quality/unit...) and they had previously announced plans to sunset the Breezometer app in September.

Breezometer is also the air quality data source for Apple Maps and I’m sure other weather apps too, so assuming the pricing is comparable there’s probably a decent business here just from existing customers.

I don't know about their tips, but generally you should start medication some weeks/days before exposure.

Literally nothing lasts forever.

"Quick! Use this in your app before we shut it down!"

Came to the comments for this. A pollen API smells exactly like the sort of product that Google will rug in a few short years when it inevitably turns out that nobody is building apps that need pollen data.

I'm disappointed as i thought they'd use actual sensors instead of guessing using old data.

I have doubts about the accuracy of the data as well. Pollen can be very localized. I'd love to see an independent study on it.

Yeah given that they don't describe any sort of innovation on the sensing side of thing, I'm guessing they just trained a neural net with nebulous inputs and expect everybody to believe in the output.