If you know how to hay fever-proof your home, you can feel better and wean yourself off Sinutab in a matter of days.
Spring is the worst month for allergy sufferers but if you don’t allergy-proof your home, you could end up sniffing and sneezing all through the year. Dust, bathroom mould, too many soft furnishings and pet hair are all allergy triggers in your home, which means that minimalism and air purifiers are your friends. Embrace tiles and shun carpets, pack away your knickknacks, redundant scatter cushions and net curtains.
Old air conditioner units and vacuum cleaners which haven’t had their dust traps properly cleaned can also aggravate the problem. But the good news is that if you use air conditioning correctly and keep the windows closed during the spring, it can greatly alleviate your symptoms. Most portable air conditioners come with filters but you can also buy air purifiers to clean dust and pollen from the air. Many air purifiers can be attached to your home’s heating and cooling systems and can remove as much as 97% of all allergens from the air.
Why do I suffer from allergies?
Some people are born with certain allergies, such as asthma, eczema and food intolerances, but hay fever usually develops in early adulthood. No-one knows exactly what triggers allergies but it is essentially an immune response that becomes oversensitive. If your body has an overdose of a potential allergen, such as penicillin, your body may react by labeling it as poisonous and you could suffer from oversensitivity to the allergen for the rest of your life. Most people have a reaction to venom such as bee and wasp venom, but if you are allergic to bees, the reaction is magnified and you may go into anaphylactic shock, where your body’s severe histamine response results in your body shutting down.
Fortunately, hay fever is a mild allergy and doesn’t hold the threat of anaphylaxis. It is, however, rather unpleasant and can impact on a person’s standard of living, which is where air purifiers come in. A recent medical report has shown that the advent of these allergies is on the increase in England, to the point that the government is calling it a ‘massive epidemic’. In a survey of GP surgeries, it was estimated that 12.2 million people in England and one in four patients have been diagnosed with some form of allergy. This is an increase from the 2001 statistic of one in five patients, which means that it is a very real problem of the modern world.
I can’t make large interior changes to my home, what now?
Realistically, most of us can’t rip out our carpets and replace them with tiles, and it’s unlikely that we can replace mouldy bathroom ceilings. Similarly, installing an interior air conditioning and filtration system is likely to be costly. So, what measures can you take on a limited budget? Surprisingly, just a few touches to your home will make a huge difference and will ease you off your dependency on Sinutab.
•Remove all indoor plants. If you want some greenery indoors stick to cacti and fake plants (some décor shops supply almost classy fake plants).
•Buy a new portable air conditioner and clean its filter regularly. Add an air purifier to an existing air conditioner and change the filter regularly. Don’t use fans, which will just succeed in redistributing dust.
•If you don’t own an air conditioner, consider contacting a portable air conditioning hire service for the spring and summer months and ask about the filter and air purifier options.
•Keep pets strictly out of bedrooms.
•Wash linen and soft furnishing regularly with non-allergenic washing powder
•Wipe down bathroom walls and ceilings with anti-fungal cleaner
•Hang clean washing inside on windy days and keep the windows
closed and the air conditioners and air purifiers on in the room you spend the most time in.
It will take about three days for you to feel the effects of your new air purifiers and allergy combating habits, but allergy and asthma relief no longer need to be a pipe dream.