IStock Photo 848735 © Trent Chambers

The odds an adult with a family income of $100,000 or more will suffer from hay fever in a year are 1 in 9.7, or a little over 10%. The odds an adult with a family income below the poverty line will experience the allergy are almost half of that—1 in 17.59.

An estimated 50 million Americans a year complain of allergic rhinitis, otherwise known as hay fever. Its symptoms—dripping, itching, sneezing, coughing—range from bothersome to debilitating. Like other allergies, hay fever results from an overly sensitive immune system reaction, one that in this case treats pollen as a dangerous invader. And like other allergies, it has been growing in prevalence, especially in developed nations.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, hay fever disproportionately plagues the wealthy. One possible explanation for this phenomenon, according to epidemiologist David P. Strachan, is the hygiene hypothesis, which states that allergies are prevented by infections in early childhood. Put simply, a dirty child will yield a healthy adult. Though Strachan’s hypothesis is far from proven, there is compelling evidence to back it up. Studies have shown that owning a dog, having multiple siblings and living on a farm—all obvious sources of germs and infection—reduce the chance of developing skin allergies. Moreover, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, allergy rates in East Germany were found to be lower than in the West (the presumption being that years of Socialist rule had created a dingy, unhygienic nation).

For all the resources that have been poured into preventing hay fever, many more have gone into treating it. Whole tracts in the 19th and 20th centuries were devoted to alleviating the allergy. George Miller Beard’s 266-page odyssey Hay-fever; Or, Summer Catarrh is a perfect example. The remedies he suggests are dizzying. They include whisky, arsenic, ergot, quinine, ipecac, ether, morphine, caffeine, chloroform, Dog’s-bane, chlorate of potash, subnitrate of Bismuth, tincture of belladonna, and a custom cold formula (five parts camphor, four parts carbonate of ammonia, one part powdered opium). Abstinence from shaving, Beard writes, is also a cure.

Modern remedies are also wide-ranging. In addition to run-of-the-mill antihistamines, there is the option of immunotherapy, where the patient’s immune system is coaxed over a period of years not to react to an allergen. For those willing to endure more invasive treatment, there is helminthic therapy (PDF). This is where the patient is intentionally infected with helminths—whipworms, pinworms, roundworms or hookworms—which dampen the immune system and effectively distract it. After this infestation, a microscopic pollen grain no longer seems worth being allergic to.