Pollen is contributing to air quality and public health concerns in Detroit.
Residents sensitive to plants such as ragweed suffer allergic reactions and asthma attacks in pollen hot-spots. Daniel Katz is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. He’s mapping out pollen levels in the city. Katz says ragweed is one of the worst producers of pollen…and it is on the rise.
“When structures are demolished…ragweed thrives in the dirt that’s left behind and so since we’ve had a lot of structures demolished in Detroit…we now have a lot more ragweed there.” :14
Katz says it’s hard to gauge whether ragweed has created higher levels of pollen than in previous years…because this type of mapping has never been done before in Detroit. But he says the research is necessary in order to understand the scope of the issue and to mitigate problems in the future.