Yes, Climate Change Really is Making Your Hay Fever Worse

Climate change is bad news for a lot of reasons—the droughts, the floods, the heat, the hurricanes. And then, too, there’s all the sneezing. If you suffer from hay fever—or allergic rhinitis (AR)—and have found your symptoms growing worse in recent years, you’re not alone. Increasingly, health care professionals are concluding that as global heat increases so too do allergy symptoms. 

In industrialized countries, hay fever diagnoses are rising by 2% to 3% per year, costing billions of dollars in health care and lost productivity.