High pollen levels on the Central Coast

Much of the country is battling high pollen counts, and the Central Coast is no exception.

It’s spring when the grass is green, the flowers are in bloom, and people are just trying to get outside. But getting outside is hard for people with allergies, such as beachgoer Valerie Espinoza. She says she gets “congested, headaches, it just been miserable.”

Typically, allergy season starts in January on the Central Coast, but this year was a bit delayed. While it may have been late to the game, the weather has allowed allergy season to come back with a vengeance.

Whitney Rassbach, an allergy doctor in Monterey says, “With all the rains that we’ve had, the trees have sort of waited to pollinate till that time. But then it’s been really intense because they have gotten a lot of moisture so they were really able to release a lot more pollen than they would have in a normal year.”

Rassbach says it’s the worst allergy season we’ve had in the past few years, and the rain can be a double edged-sword.

Here is the good news: with rain making its way toward the Central Coast, the pollen will temporarily be washed away. But that break won’t last long. “In the long term it actually causes more problems because of the fact that it produces the trees, they take all that rain and that moisture and they turn it into more pollen for the future,” Rassbach says.

Allergy season typically tapers off at the beginning of June and Rassbach feels that will be the case this year.