Allergy season really is getting worse every year. Here’s how science can help
If it seems as though everyone around you has been sneezing, coughing and wheezing more often this summer, you’re not imagining things. Allergies are both becoming more common and getting worse. In some ways, this is not news. Respiratory allergy, asthma, eczema and food allergy rates have all been ticking upward for at least the past 50 years. Currently, approximately 30-40% of the global population has at least one allergic condition.
Industrialisation, urbanisation, changing diets, overuse of antibiotics and the climate crisis – with its warming temperatures, increased flooding and wildfires – are all exacerbating the difficulties our immune systems face as they are exposed to more and more things. So recently, if you’ve felt like your body is becoming more and more irritated by the world around it, you’re probably correct. In essence, our immune cells are being overwhelmed by modern life – more pollen in the air from both native and invasive plants; all the chemicals that we use in products, from detergents to shampoos; particulate matter from the fuels we burn. Even our companion animals – all the dogs, cats and birds that live inside our homes – are developing allergies. All of our immune systems are struggling to keep up with the changes we’ve been making over the past 200 years.
A key problem when it comes to treating our allergies more effectively – or preventing them from developing in the first place – is our lack of understanding of exactly how our immune systems learn to tolerate all the things we come into contact with.
We simply do not understand why one immune cell within our body will make the decision to respond negatively to a pollen grain – activating a full-on allergic reaction – while another immune cell in the same body does nothing. In theory, all of our immune cells should act exactly alike; they have the same genetics, environment and exposures. But we know that they don’t – and we’re absolutely in the dark as to why.
There are two reasons for this ignorance, in an era of fantastic scientific progress. First, the immune system itself is incredibly complicated and, until fairly recently, we simply didn’t have the technology to observe it in action. But the second, and perhaps more crucial, reason is this: until very recently, allergy was a backwater specialisation in medicine, largely ignored and drastically underfunded. At conferences in the 1980s, there were hardly any presentations on food allergy at all, despite rising numbers of patients throughout the US and Europe. There were only around 40 researchers even working on the topic.
Fortunately, over the past few decades, we’ve been slowly learning more about the biological mechanisms that drive our allergies. And we’ve been able to start using that knowledge to prevent allergies from developing in the first place – or at least to help us live with them when we can’t avoid them. We know that living close to major roads and bus depots as children can lead to a much higher risk of developing respiratory allergies and asthma. We also understand that early childhood exposure to certain microorganisms – like the “good” bacteria found in farmhouse dust – can have a protective effect. The “hygiene hypothesis” – or the idea that a little dirt can be good for us – is at least partially true; the problem is that we still don’t know which microbes are helping us or how. More research into the basic mechanisms behind allergy has also led to us dispelling unhelpful myths about allergies – sorry, probiotics aren’t helpful, and neither is eating local honey.
Perhaps the best example of how investing in research can lead to better outcomes is in the realm of food allergy. In response to the rising rates of paediatric food allergy in the late 1980s and early 90s, paediatricians counselled parents of young children to avoid giving them allergenic foods – such as peanuts or soy – before the age of three. It turned out, based on newer scientific studies, that was exactly the wrong advice. We now know that it’s a great idea to introduce infants to trace amounts of allergens as early as possible. Some children will still show signs of an allergy, but since the new guidelines came into effect in 2016, we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in food allergy to nuts.
But it wasn’t just food allergy research that was underfunded, leaving us more vulnerable to the wrong advice. In fact, allergy research in general in the last century received far less funding and attention than other medical conditions that seemed more serious and deadly – like cancer or diabetes. Medical schools barely touched upon allergies at all, spending on average just two weeks on the subject. This lack of focus on allergies is largely still the case, despite the fact that the recent significant rise in food allergy rates has galvanised a lot of private research funding on the topic. The problem with private money is that it’s often funnelled into the search for specific treatments instead of trying to understand basic immune functions or research that ultimately might lead to a “cure” or a more permanent solution.
As someone who has spent over five years investigating the history, science and economics of allergies and talking to researchers in the field, I can tell you that we absolutely need governments, advocacy groups and other NGOs to fund more basic science on the immune system and the various allergy pathways that are triggered in allergic disease. Considering that 4 billion people worldwide – 50% of us – are expected to have an allergic condition in the next decade, it should be an urgent priority.
The good news is that funding more basic research on allergy will probably uncover scientific knowledge that might help us prevent or treat a whole host of other immune-related disorders, like autoimmune diseases such as lupus or Crohn’s disease, and help us harness the power of our immune cells to ward off cancers as well as invading viruses and harmful bacteria.
There’s no downside to pouring more money into understanding all the aspects of our immune cells and how they “think”. That basic science is likely to help us all live longer, healthier, happier lives in our fast-changing environment. But in the meantime, if your allergies are getting worse or you’re struggling to find effective treatments, know that you’re not alone and that allergy researchers are dedicated to finding ways to help you. They just need a lot more of our support to find the keys to a possible cure – which is likely to be understanding our immune cells enough to be able to retrain them, or prevent them from making the wrong decisions about a grass pollen or milk protein in the first place. And wouldn’t that be nice?
Theresa MacPhail is a medical anthropologist and author of Allergic: How Our Immune System Reacts to a Changing World
the protest there as an “LGBT civil rights demonstration”, not mentioning that it was organized as a protest against police violence, arbitrary arrests and entrapment everywhere in Los Angeles, in solidarity with East Los Angeles, Pacoima, Venice and Watts, where Black residents had staged a historic uprising against police violence and racism just two years before.
Today, postcards of the 1967 Silver Lake demonstration with young people holding signs denouncing “Blue Fascism” are given to patrons of the Black Cat Tavern with their bills. There’s no reference to the decades when the Black Cat building transformed into a series of different gay bars, including Le Barcito, which offered drag performances in Spanish, and Club Fuck! at Basgo’s Disco, which was famous for its art-punk aesthetic and BDSM performance art.
Along Sunset Boulevard, there are other holdouts from Silver Lake’s gayer past: Rough Trade, a leather and fetish shop, is a few doors down from the Black Cat. But Circus of Books, once a famous purveyor of gay porn, is now a cannabis store, Palencia noted. And A Different Light bookstore, part of a small national chain of LGBTQ+ bookstores and a place where his friends used to hold poetry readings, had been torn down, he said.
Off Sunset Boulevard, the neighborhood streets that were once destinations for gay cruising now have hardly any traffic, Palencia pointed out as we drove through. Most of the “no cruising” traffic signs that once filled the neighborhood are gone; one that remains is half-covered with graffiti.
Silver Lake’s history is personal for Palencia, 66, who has lived here and in nearby neighborhoods for most of the past 40 years. In 1980, in his early 20s, he moved into a tiny apartment on a hill above Sunset Boulevard that cost about $150 a month. (Today, onebedrooms can easily reach $3,000.) For Palencia, who had immigrated from Guatemala as a teenager, the place had a “geographical symbolism” he appreciated.
“It’s right between East Los Angeles, which has traditionally been Latino, and West Hollywood, which became more gay,” he said. For young activists navigating their identities in a city that could be hostile to both queer people and Latinos, “this was the midpoint,”
Palencia said. “This was home.”
Silver Lake, then a largelyLatino neighborhood, became a haven for Palencia and his friends, who cofounded Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), an advocacy group focused on issues and people they felt white gay organizations and white feminist organizations ignored.
At restaurants like Crest, now a bar called 33 Taps, they organized events, flirted and argued. While there were tensions at the time between gay and lesbian organizers in LA, the gay men who started GLLU reached out to lesbian Latinas to get them involved as leaders in the group, as documented in Unidad, a new film about the group’s history. Palencia said this was crucial: “Politically, the lesbians were much more evolved in terms of their thinking of systems – like patriarchy, economic systems, sexism, even racism,” with an agenda “that went beyond sexual politics”.
GLLU members supported Latino labor organizers and the United Farm Workers, and prominent labor activists, including Dolores Huerta, marched alongside them in a 1983 Pride parade.
The West Hollywood gay scene, in contrast, was sometimes explicitly racist and misogynistic: Studio One, a prominent club, sparked protests for its exclusion of men of color and of women, and its obvious preference for wealthier white male patrons.
But Silver Lake could also be dangerous, Palencia said: there were gaybashing attacks carried out by local Latino gang members. One of his close friends was kidnapped and stuffed into a car.
To address the tensions between gay and Latino residents without turning to “mass incarceration,” organizers started a free local music festival, the Sunset Junction street fair, in 1980, which had activities for kids and bands to appeal to a wide range of cultural interests. The festival continued until 2011. “We wanted to make sure that everyone was included, including gang members, so they became the security [for the fair], and it was such a smart move,” Palencia said.
Tacos Delta, founded in 1981, was located in the middle of the festival, and the family-owned restaurant is still busy and in business: “Tacos never went out of style,” Palencia said.
But the mid-1980s brought a new crisis: Aids deaths were rising, and communities of color, including Latinos, were disproportionately affected. The epidemic had a huge effect in Silver Lake. “A lot of people, especially gay men who lived here, they died,” Palencia said. “A depopulation happened because of that.”
Gay organizations led by white activists in Los Angeles often neglected outreach to people of color, including Latino community members, failing even to offer crucial information in Spanish. As described in the Unidad documentary, now streaming on PBS, GLLU responded by creating their own Latino-focused community health organization, Bienestar Human Services, to do HIV and Aids outreach, even as they were losing some of their own leaders to the disease. One of Bienestar’s early offices, Palencia said, was upstairs in a building that is now an Intelligentsia coffee shop, crowded with patrons on MacBooks working on their scripts.
Silver Lake today reminds Palencia of how, “when the Spaniards came to the Americas, they actually used the stones of the Aztec temples to build the churches”, he said. “Gentrification was built on the back, so to speak, of what went before.”
During the height of the Aids crisis, Flamingo, a Latina lesbian bar on Sunset Boulevard with a big outdoor patio, transformed into the headquarters of Being Alive, a community organization for people with HIV to support each other.
Today the building has become Bacari, a fancy tapas place. The backyard is crowded with cafe tables and is a coveted date night spot. Palencia came to Bacari recently to celebrate his retirement. Only the trees are the same, Palencia said, but the tapas are very good.
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After seeing so many queer establishments that had been whitewashed, mainstreamed, or completely erased, we needed a break. Palencia drove a few blocks off Sunset Boulevard to what he called a “little oasis that’s still the same as what it’s been in the past decades”.
Casita del Campo, an iconic Mexican restaurant in a bright pink building, has been a refuge for gay patrons since its founding in 1962, and it’s still owned by the same Hollywood showbiz family.
Rudy Del Campo, who started the restaurant, had been a dancer featured in films like West Side Story, an American in Paris, and A Star is Born, and his old friends and colleagues became his new patrons – including, of course, many gay people. His wife, Nina del Campo, a charismatic blonde from Colombia, would have loved to act in Hollywood, but her accent was too strong, a disqualification at the time. Instead, her son said, the restaurant became her stage.
In the early days, closeted gay Hollywood celebrities like Rock Hudson, one of the most prominent people to die early in the Aids crisis, frequented the restaurant, which had dark booths with curtains on the windows, so that patrons could dine without scrutiny from outside. Rudy’s son, Robert del Campo, and his wife, Gina, who currently own and run the restaurant, both worked there when they were younger. The restaurant’s central room used to feature crowds of gay men, there to see and be seen, they said. Some of the restaurant’s regulars even had their names painted on the backs of chairs.
The Aids epidemic hit the restaurant hard. There was funeral after funeral for the regulars, and for the restaurant’s staff. Other longtime customers came in gaunt, or skeletal, battling the virus but still trying to live a normal life.
In the aftermath of so much loss, “it became quiet for a few years,” Robert said. By the early 2000s, more families were coming in to eat, and the cars driving in the streets were shinier and more expensive. Gentrification had fully arrived. Many other Mexican restaurants around Casita del Campo ended up closing. Big name chain stores moved in.
What has kept Casita del Campo from being turned into “the world’s biggest Chipotle”, as Robert put it? In part, the fact that the family owns the building, which Rudy del Campo bought in the 1960s. They also credit the restaurant’s enduring culture, which remains defiantly cheerful and very local. Hollywood figures and queer celebrities like Katy Perry, Robert Pattinson, Gwen Stefani, and St Vincent still stop by, especially to the drag shows hosted at the Cavern Club, a theater within the restaurant. One of Robert and Gina’s sons came out to them as gay while sitting in one of the booths once popular with closeted celebrities.
The restaurant host when we visited was 18-year-old Logan Wynn, who has lived in the neighborhood his whole life, and who chatted amiably with us about the restaurant’s gay history and his memories of eating here as a kid.
“I love the diversity here,” he said. “Especially now that it’s been getting gentrified in Silver Lake. This place has always stayed the same. It’s always true to everyone.”