Recommendations

In order to further raise public awareness, another function could be added to our data analysis tool to automatically or semi-automatically send present data entries to a website that reports the data to the public. Polleninfo.org is the best platform for this because it is the most widely used, has been advocated by our collaborators, and performs its own mapping functions on the data it receives from its pollen collectors across Europe. It publishes forecasted data for select regions to the public, so our group investigated what would be required to get live pollen counts and forecasts for Bucharest published. We had additionally hoped to publish this information to Facebook to reach more of the public. Continuation of this preliminary work would help allergy sufferers cope with their symptoms.

We met with the polleninfo.org team in an attempt to establish pollen forecasting in the Romanian polleninfo webpage. The researchers personally believed that the most useful features for Bucharest’s pollen monitoring system would be short term and medium term forecasting, which could then lead to the development of other features such as personalized pollen forecasting, as described in section 2.3.3. In order to have any feature enabled on the polleninfo website, a one time fee would be required. Additionally, to get features such as short and medium term or personalized forecasting, our Romanian collaborators would need to regularly create their own forecasts and maintain the webpages. It would be helpful to lessen the required manpower by creating a neural network (advanced computing algorithm) to predict pollen counts, similar to the one Dr. Leru has participated in creating for the Pannonian Basin of Hungary. Carrying out this research could be combined with finding ways to advertise the forecasting system in Bucharest to create a future WPI IQP.

Since the COVID-19 virus attacks the lungs of those who are infected, it has become more important than ever to seek out a correlation between the inflammation caused by pollen and other health conditions such as COPD, viruses, and more. Our report covers the factors that affect the raw pollen counts, and can only estimate the perceived effect on the public using Google Trends. Documented links to true health data would provide a very strong argument towards Romania developing a National Aerobiology Network. Medical data, such as the rate of cardiac death and rate of new allergy patients, could potentially be correlated to pollen or pollutant levels. The Correlation Machine has been designed to easily import new categories of data and will be able to process this data whenever it is available.

Distributing surveys for data collection was difficult, since a large number of responses is required for the results to be statistically significant. Despite the restrictions from COVID-19, we received 92 responses. Since lifestyle data is an important aspect in this study, we came up with several ways to help gather a larger number of responses in the future. First, we suggest the survey can be handed to the people in the waiting room at Colentina Hospital. It can be accessed electronically or as a paper flyer. If the hospital database has the email address of allergy patients, Dr. Leru can also send the survey to them via email. To reach an even broader audience, Dr. Leru can share the survey to other hospitals or allergists in Romania, or to the members of the Romanian Society of Allergology and Clinical Immunology (RSACI). Additionally, another way to encourage people to take the survey is to create an incentive, usually in monetary form, depending on the budget of the research. https://www.prolific.co/ is a survey distribution platform that allows an organization to give out payments to participants for their time taking the survey. In the future, with more responses, results from the survey can be integrated into the analysis tool to determine any correlation between people’s lifestyle and pollen allergies.

As mentioned previously, there is a link between COVID-19 infection and PM_2.5. Like PM_2.5, pollen is a lung irritant and causes an immune response. It is possible that pollen could have a similar effect as PM_2.5 regarding COVID-19.

Comparing a graph of the historic grass pollen counts with the current COVID-19 map shown in Figure 28, the hotspots for pollen including Northern Italy, Spain, Istanbul and the United Kingdom are also hotspots for COVID-19. The high number of infected people in these areas is concerning, because those with asthma are among the high risk groups for having more severe COVID-19 infections, and we may therefore expect the death rate to be higher in these pollinated areas (CDC,2020). These relationships merit further and more intense studying as the global scientific community tries to understand COVID-19. If it were studied and confirmed that pollen symptoms increase the spread and death rate of COVID-19, knowing beforehand could help prepare allergy sufferers to keep their symptoms managed through reducing exposure and medication, reducing the number of new cases and deaths.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15vU38s3naJ5UUyVFk-Vod0qLbWU1Vx3B/view?usp=sharing