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Jack Schwartz, 8, has had seasonal allergy symptoms in the past, but his parents never needed to give him medication. This year was different. On the way to his baseball league’s opening celebration in Stow, Massachusetts, the second-grader started crying so hard his mother was afraid he’d have a panic attack after pollen blew into his eyes through open car windows.

“His eyes were just burning; they were really red,” says his mother, Julie Glovin. Luckily, the family ran into a friend whose son also had seasonal allergies, who recommended antihistamine eye drops for Jack. “Within a minute, he was much better,” Glovin says. Now he’s taking Zyrtec for kids, and so far is doing well.

Just as spring is the time for getting outside to enjoy blooming flowers and baseball pitches, it’s also a time of misery for allergy sufferers.

This year, some parts of the country are reporting a worse-than-usual allergy season—although your symptoms depend on where you live, experts say.

Pollen is worse in some parts of the United States than others
The Pacific Northwest, for example, experienced a very chilly winter followed by a speedy spring warm-up, causing many plants to release their pollen at the same time. And in parts of the South, pollen levels peaked in mid-February, dropped down, and then climbed back up again in March, resulting in one of the worst spring allergy seasons in years.

“We’re definitely seeing more patients with this heavy pollen,” says Stanley Fineman, MD, an allergist at the Atlanta Allergy and Asthma Clinic. Because people with allergies were first exposed to pollen a month earlier than usual, then a second time when pollen was released at the normal time, they were essentially “primed” to have a particularly violent reaction, he says. “When you’re re-exposed to the allergen, you need less quantity of the allergen to create the same symptoms.”

Although predicting allergy season can be tougher than predicting the weather, people who are allergic to spring pollinators such as trees and grasses now have many ways to find out what pollen levels are on a particular day.

You can check your local newspaper or visit websites such as pollen.com for local pollen counts, which lists the day’s five worst cities and five best cities for pollen (Good? Miami. Bad? Muskegon, Michigan.) At pollen.com you can even plug in your ZIP code to see a 30-day history of pollen counts or get a four-day allergy forecast. Also check out this Forbes article for the top 100 cities for pollen in 2008. But your itchy eyes, nose, and ears probably can give you your own personal pollen update.

Most scientists do agree that there’s been a warming trend over the past 10 years that appears to be pushing the start of spring allergy season earlier in certain parts of the country; unfortunately, this doesn’t mean it will end earlier.

And even though weather patterns do play a role in the severity of allergy season, sensitivities vary from person to person. In the Northeast, where plentiful rains have kept the air relatively clear, things haven’t been too bad, allergists and some patients say.

Next page: Allergy shots may help