■lO-Lancastar Farariag, Satarday, March 30,1985 to® Pollen: the breath of life WASHINGTON - To the IS million Americans who suffer through the seasonal agonies of hay fever, pollen is unquestionably something to be sneezed at. But the tiny grains that torment one out of 14 citizens, who in 1975 spent $2 million on hospital care, $224 million in doctors’ bills, and |297 million on drugs, are a blessing, not a bane, to most people. “Pollen is to plants what sperm is to animals: the agent of viability,” writes Cathy Newman in the October National Geographic. “It is the breath of life as well as of sneezes.” Allergic or not, there’s almost no way for you to escape it. Various hay-fever cures are being studied but none has yet been found. NOPLACE TO HIDE And hiding places have all but disappeared. Even Arizona, once a haven for the afflicted, has lost that advantage, largely because of the introduction of non-native plants that have sent the pollen count soaring about tenfold in two decades. “If you don’t mind penguins, you can always go to Antarctica,” suggests Dr. Max Sam ter, senior allergy and immunology con sultant at Grant Hospital in Chicago. Newman’s reporting on pollen took her far beyond the wheezes and sneezes of hay-fever sufferers: to a murder in Vienna, to a Navajo PIN< REP isuow BLUE BROWN BALLET: THERE ARB MANY DIFFERENT MAYS OF TELL /ATSA STORY. IT CRN SB TOLD ININORDS PICTURES, MUSIC, PND CAN BE ACTED OUT ANOTHER IN AY TO TBU AS7OR//S BYOANCINSJHIS /S CALLED A BALLET. THE STORY IS TOLD BYTNE MOVE MENTOF THE ACTORS. THERE IS NO SI NO!NS OR SPEAK IAI6. SOMETIMES BAL LET IS CALLED ToEDANCm WHICH CREATES U6HTNESS. medicine man’s hogan m Arizona, to a Paris laboratory, to a Texas oil field, to an athletic field in Finland. In Vienna, the only clue in a 1959 murder was a pair of leather boots belonging to the suspect. Less than a gram of dirt clung to the carefully cleaned boots. A pollen expert-called a palynologist found 1,200 grains of pollen in the dirt. The pollen pinpointed the location of the murder and con tradicted the suspect’s story. Confronted with the evidence, he confessed and led officers to the buried body. In the Navajo hogan, Fred Stevens Jr., a medicine man in Chinle, Ariz., told Newman: “Com pollen is a true thing. It is our life. When a child is bom, we feed it pollen, and it is in his spirit the rest of his life. At weddings it blesses the young couple. And when a man is dying, pollen is put on him too.” Pueblo and Apache Indian tribes of the Southwest use the sacred substance in various ceremonies, from puberty rites to special dances to healing rituals. The Navajo owner of a new pickup truck, Newman was told, even sprinkled pollen on the tires to bless it. GRIEVING CAVEMEN In Paris, palynologists examined grains of pollen, which survives the ages, from a 50,000-year-old grave site of a Neanderthal man in Shanidar Cave, Iraq. The scien tists concluded that neither ORAM6E PEACH LT.BRWKI LT BLUE LT. GREEN WERE ARE l 0“ DIFFERENCES BETWEEN 7RE TWO PICTURES. CRN YOU FIND 7RE/7? P ANSWERS ano io do 3dbHs Co/ u&oo skos no awdism fll 'JNt/OS S7&/0 NO N&Jilt/d (' B ' IXI9J.SXU NO ddOD lN(/d (L ' SOd/Q do X3QU/nN( V dt/3 OMdyOIS* £ AOfl NO NOISJdfS dt/D SAOO NO HOMSd(h £3jU/JM<3 S7d/€> QNOO3S NO U/(dl ( C -90(7 NO SlOdS (T 31M SKOQ QNOO3& (I animals nor wind could have carried the pollen so far back in the cave, but that mourners had left flowers. “The tiniest of clues had revealed a new dimension of cave dwelling Neanderthal man," Newman writes. “He grieved.” In the Texas oilfields, the in- 6s . , °a\ £ \l( 77 ».< " regard oil exploration as static. It’s not. Think of mountains uplifting, seas drying up, plants evolving. What could be more grand?” On the Finnish track, Seppo Nuuttila extols the value of pollen supplements for the Olympic (Turn to Page B 13) s>\ Vv V-M #