AN ILL WIND : Mean and Early Allergy Season Has Doctors’ Offices Deluged

It started with “something in the air”--something that made her eyes itch, her nose run and left her with pounding headaches, Maria Ortiz said.

To her husband’s dismay--and her embarrassment--the Anaheim homemaker soon began spending many afternoons in bed instead of doing household chores because detergents caused her nose to stop up and dusting gave her headaches.

“I couldn’t understand what was going on,” said Ortiz, 52. She began to think her symptoms were a product of her imagination after visits to six doctors since January failed to turn up a cause for her ailments.

Last month, she finally discovered that she suffers from allergies.

“I’ve been having problems with itching eyes and a runny nose for the last five years, but this spring has been the worst,” Ortiz said this week as she underwent skin testing at the allergy clinic at UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange.

She went to the clinic to find out what kinds of plants, trees, animals and foods give her allergic reactions so that she can begin receiving allergy shots for them.

Because potential sufferers are flocking to the clinic during the worst spring allergy season in five years, the waiting period for new patients has mushroomed from two weeks to two months.

“We’ve had a mini-epidemic of seasonal hay fever and acute asthma since the weather warmed up and the winds started blowing,” said Dr. Harold S. Novey, who heads the allergy clinic and is a professor of medicine at UC Irvine.

The reason, doctors said, is that an unusually dry winter, coupled with an early--and heavy--onslaught of dry Santa Ana winds, has intensified the amount of pollens and other materials in the air. Normally, “hay fever season” is worst in late spring when grass pollens are most abundant.

And many of the people who were hard hit during the winter flu season have found themselves more susceptible to allergies, the doctors said.

Health experts said the result has been that homemakers such as Ortiz have delayed spring cleaning, students have been forced to miss weeks of school and parents have been awakened at all hours of the night by youngsters crying because of clogged breathing passages. Some businessmen seeking treatment said they have scheduled more business trips to the East Coast to get away from the pollen.

The long lines and even longer waiting list at UCI Medical Center are mirrored at offices of private practitioners across Orange County. A recently completed survey of the county’s 35 allergists by their medical society shows that the patient load is up 15% over what it was at this time last year.

The physician referral office for St. Joseph Hospital in Orange reported that calls from people asking to be put in contact with allergists are running 10% over the same period last year.

And the allergy sufferers jamming doctors’ waiting rooms are complaining of nasal discharge, runny noses, sneezing, watery and itchy eyes, itchy mouths, sore throats, chest tightness, coughing, shortness of breath and wheezing, said Dr. Arthur Turk, president of the Orange County Society of Allergy and Immunology.

To find out what they’re allergic to, many of these patients are having their arms and backs pricked 100 times or more and having applied to these pinpricks drops of solutions made from common substances in the environment that cause allergies.

Ultimately, some patients may find they have to undergo twice-weekly allergy shots if the skin tests show that their allergic reactions are severe, doctors said.

“This is the worst spring allergy season in five or six years,” said Turk, who added that he has been very busy seeing new patients as well as keeping up with his old patients at his offices in Tustin and Huntington Beach.

The pollen season began unusually early this year, with the pollen count at 8,000 units per cubic meter in January, or double what it was a year ago, said Dr. Mark Ellis, an allergist in private practice in Orange, whose office compiles pollen statistics for Orange County as a public service.

Dr. William E. Berger, who, along with two colleagues, sees 1,000 patients a month at offices in Mission Viejo, El Toro and Laguna Hills, warned: “The worst is yet to come. So far we’ve been seeing the effects of pollen from trees, especially olive trees.

“But the bigger cause of hay fever is the pollen from grasses,” Berger said. Grass pollen in the county reaches a peak in May, he said, before tapering off at the end of June.

Spring usually is the worst time of the year for allergy sufferers, the Allergy Society’s Turk said. But this year has been particularly tough for the roughly one in five people in Orange County who are afflicted with allergies, experts said.

“The rains were much earlier this year,” Turk said. “And when that happens, there is much more luxurious growth of vegetation, with trees and grass pollinating vigorously and earlier.

“Allergies are a common disease, but it takes certain things to stimulate them,” he continued. “This year, it seems to have been the combination of people being exposed to an overwhelming amount of pollen and severe viral infections, especially the bad flu season, we went through this winter.”

UC Irvine’s Novey cited a study by the National Institutes of Health that discovered allergies are the third leading cause of illness, other than colds, in this country for people under the age of 45. Only mental illness and back injuries afflict more people, according to the study.

“Other than the common cold, it is the most common cause of loss of time from school or work,” Novey said.

Southern California’s notorious Santa Ana winds play a large role in aggravating allergies in Orange County, Novey said.

“For example, there is little or no mesquite growing in the county. But we’ve done studies at UCI showing that the reason we have such a problem with it here is that it is blown here from 50 miles (away) by the strong, dry Santa Anas,” Novey said.

Allergies have different degrees of severity, generally based on what part of the respiratory tract they affect, Turk said.

People who have allergies in the upper respiratory tract, Turk said, suffer from hay fever, which causes such symptoms as chronic stuffiness, postnasal drainage, tenderness and discharge. These problems can escalate into sinus infections, headaches and fever, Turk said.

“Some people become upper respiratory cripples because they have such chronic congestion--something like having a continuous cold--and headaches so bad that they simply can’t function in everyday life, whether it means doing housework, working on the job or going to school,” Turk said.

Usually these symptoms will respond to antihistamines, decongestants, antibiotics or allergy shots, he said. “But sometimes we can’t get the inflammation down using these methods because it’s been going on so long,” he said.

“These are the people with fevers of 104 degrees, and whose nasal passages are draining pus. We have to go in and do surgery to drain their nasal passages,” he said.

However, about 30% of people with allergies have problems with their lower respiratory tracts, a condition more commonly known as asthma, UC Irvine’s Novey said.

Added Turk: “These are people who have a genetic inflammation in the lung tissue that causes them problems ranging from wheezing to recurrent coughs.”

Wheezing and coughs can become so severe that people with asthma can break their ribs, especially if they are elderly or very young children, Turk said.

The surge in the number of patients that he and other allergists in Orange County are seeing seems to be about equally divided between hay fever sufferers and asthmatics, Turk said.

“These tend to be people who have had mild symptoms before,” he said. “But these symptoms flared out of control this spring because of the unusual weather and the viruses that went around this winter.”

“It has taken them a while to come to us allergists, because it’s not obvious a lot of times what is going on,” he said. “They’ve been going to their family physicians with stuffed-up noses or recurrent coughs. They’ve been given antibiotics that just don’t seem to clear up the problem.

“These people kind of come to us as a last resort after they’ve exhausted their other options by using over-the-counter remedies or seeing their family doctors a number of times,” he said. “We can help almost all these people.”