It's True - We think there are 300 million trillion ants on earth. That's 3 followed by 20 zeros. Since an ant is about 4 millimetres long that means you could produce a column of ants 12 followed by 20 zeros millimetres long. Since light travels at 300 million metres per second it would take a beam of light shone along the column 126 years to travel from the first to the last ant.

It's True - Hungry Brits snack their way through 9.3 kg of chocolate per person per year.

It's False - In recent surveys, looks came third with 67% of women ranking them as important, intelligence was in second place, favoured by 76% of women, and a "GSOH" - good sense of humour (though this could also stand for good standard of hygiene) came top at 98%. Interestingly women were not that interested in being looked after - only 34% rated cooking ability as important!

It's False - Not quite. The global chocolate industry is worth about £30 billion (about $43 billion).

 

 

 

 

Rhinitis is inflammation of your nose and hayfever is one of the types of rhinitis. So hayfever is a bit of a stupid name but it's one that has stuck, even though there's no hay and there's no fever involved. Inflammation of the nose can happen for lots of different reasons, but if you are allergic to a certain form of a pollen, then you may have allergic rhinitis. This means that when you inhale the substance you're allergic to, it triggers all those running, itching and sneezing symptoms in your nose. Nose sprays can play an extremely important role but the first thing to do is find out exactly which type of rhinitis you have. For that purpose you may need to see an immunologist or an allergist who specialises in allergies of the nose. They will undertake a series of allergy tests to find out what's causing the problem and how to avoid them the best. The next treatment is to reduce the symptoms in the nose and there are lots of drugs for doing that. There are all sorts of nasal sprays, although typically steroid nasal sprays which are much safer than steroid tablets and don't have the same side effects. Antihistamines are also a very common treatment, but there are other drugs too.

 

It really depends on what kind of allergen is causing the symptoms, but it sounds like it's a type of pollen. Of course, when he's out and about during the day, he's going to be meeting that pollen, but when he's in bed, he's likely not to. The exception for this is whether he or his partner has long hair. I often find people with pollen allergies have terrible problems at night because one of them has very long hair. What we know about long hair is that it is a complete static pollen magnet. So if you wash your hair before you go to bed rather than when you get up in the morning, you can spend an allergy-free night without having a cloud of pollen around you.

 

Children certainly do get allergy and allergy to nuts and some of the allergies go away with time. Unfortunately nut allergy tends not to. 85% of children with nut allergy will have it for life, but it's not impossible to develop an allergy later in life, and I often get patients who say 'why me and why now? I'm nearly thirty!' and I'm afraid it just happens. It certainly isn't an exclusion, so if you start to develop serious symptoms of an allergy in later life, get it sorted out because it can be an allergy.

 

Presumably his immune system just got the hang of dealing with that pollen. Instead of making IgE antibodies against it, it presumably changed to making IgG. The other type of development in the immune system is when another type of cell comes along called the T-regulatory cell. That is allergen-specific but gives off cytokines, the communication chemicals that damp down the immune system. So whereas there used to be an allergic reaction, it may be that his T-regulatory cells have now got the hang of controlling that and that's great news for him.

 

We have different patterns of hormones that go up and down during the 24-hour day and some of the healing hormones seem to be involved in the sleep phase of the day rather than the daylight phase of the day. But we're mending all the time, breaking down bits of the body and rebuilding it as we need it.

 

It's not a particularly common allergy and I wonder whether she's had formal testing against that. All those plants are quite irritating in their own right. If I peel an onion my eyes and nose start to water, which is a bit like what you get with an allergy, but it isn't really an allergy that is there. She may or may not have had this proven by a proper laboratory test or a skin test.

 

I think we train our immune systems quite politely without having to do that!

 

 

A common to reaction to an allergy is more to have you nose run or to wheeze, but the same sort of process can happen in your skin. That histamine is making the blood vessels leak out their fluid rather than the red cells in them and that makes the skin swell up and go red. The mast cells that do this histamine release are also found in your skin. They're just under the skin. I think it's very important to realise that quite a lot of people get hive or urticaria most days of the year. In fact, they have chronic urticaria. This is not an allergy but many GPs will look at them and say it must be an allergy because they've got a rash. It never is in that situation and it's worthwhile seeing an immunologist or a doctor and getting that sorted out.