Arizona Desert Is No Oasis for Allergy Victims

Terri Cast slumps in the chair of her doctor’s office, nine dots the color of roses blossoming across her arm. “I itch. I itch!” she complains, jutting a finger at one spreading splotch, demanding to know what it is.

Across the hall, Lonnie Kelly sits amazingly still as a doctor thrusts an instrument up her nose and asks, “Still having the allergies?” “Oh, yeah,” she responds, her watery eyes shooting him a look of, “What are you, nuts?”

A few doors down, Anne Abbott Gee, a set of blotches identical to Cast’s decorating her arm, munches on a chocolate chip cookie as she waits 20 minutes to be sure she doesn’t stop breathing.

To think people once fled to Tucson to escape pollen.

As early as 1929, a brochure for a local sanatorium promised treatment for sinusitis and other respiratory ailments, proclaiming, “The desert is God’s great health-giving laboratory.”

“That’s crap,” sniffs Kelly, a Tucson resident since 1976. “My kids didn’t have allergies before we came here. My husband never had allergies until we came here. Everybody I know who’s come here from somewhere else has developed allergies.”

These days, for some, a visit to the allergist’s office comes as frequently as a stop at the grocery store.

A twice-weekly newspaper column dispenses advice on avoiding allergenic plants and substances.

A respiratory radio show optimistically titled “Breathing Easy” is broadcast weekly.

“You always hear, ‘Hey, the desert’s great for your sinuses,’ ” says Cast, who had hoped the desert landscape would alleviate her allergies when she moved here from Tennessee in February. Instead she found herself surrounded by pollen-producing plants.

“There’s a lot of green stuff out here. There’s millions of plants,” she says. “I don’t know what all the stuff is, but there’s a lot of green stuff.”

Ironically, those who flocked here for health reasons over the decades are among those to blame for the sneezing and wheezing of today’s Tucsonians.

By the late 1800s, the Southern Pacific Co. had a rail line running through Tucson, and with the so-called health-seekers came the farmers and ranchers and miners. They came from the East, the Midwest, from California and Europe to make the desert their own.

Part of that meant turning the desolate swath of land into an oasis of sorts.

“If you’re going to live here, you want to try to make it comfortable,” says Mark Sneller, an allergy researcher who examined pollen changes in Tucson from the 1940s through the 1980s. “It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that a lawn reflected less heat than hard-packed earth.”

Bermuda grass was introduced for pastures and lawns. European olive trees, brought to the United States in the 18th century by Spanish missionaries, were planted for fruit and shade. Later, Tucsonians imported Chinese mulberry trees for shade.

Few knew the nonnative plants would spawn another species once alien to the desert: allergies.

Although much of the natural desert vegetation was insect-pollinated, rarely causing allergic reactions, the nonnative plants were wind-pollinated and produced large quantities of airborne pollen.

“Even while doctors around the world were sending patients here when the area was noted for its sanatoriums, it didn’t hold weight for people with allergies because we were doing everything contrary to the elimination of allergies,” Sneller says.

The earliest extensive report about pollenosis in Arizona was published in 1922 and included a list of plants considered capable of causing hay fever in the Southwest --among them Bermuda grass.

In 1932 another report recognized the olive tree as a potential hay fever problem.

But it wasn’t until the 1960s, when the Tucson population went from 45,454 to 212,892 in a decade and trees planted years earlier matured, that the pollen counts exploded. The biggest culprits: mulberry, olive and Bermuda grass.

By the 1980s, pollen counts had increased tenfold compared with the 1940s, Sneller says. In 1984, the county outlawed the sale of olive and mulberry trees and mandated that Bermuda grass be cut regularly, threatening violators with fines.

Tucson, onetime haven for health seekers, became home to the first pollen-control ordinance in the nation. Other Southwestern cities followed, including Albuquerque, El Paso and Las Vegas.

Today about half of the 840,000 people who live in the Tucson area suffer from allergies--twice as high as the national average, Sneller says.

And because the pollen ordinance did not require trees already in the ground to be removed, the misery continues.

That is the legacy of the desert pioneers.

“They tried to take a desert and make it a tropical area,” Kelly says, pausing to clear her irritated throat before finishing. “It doesn’t work.”