The causes of allergies may have some relationship to the environment, genetics, or the way you were born. According to CNN, about 500,000 people in the United States suffer from varying degrees of allergies. So how do you get allergies? When pollen, pet dander, or certain types of food enter our bodies, they are called antigens. If your body is sensitive, the antigen evolves into an allergen in your body, which causes your body to produce immunoglobulin E, or immunoglobulin E antibodies. Unfortunately, immunoglobulin E antibody release can put out large amounts of active substances such as histamine, which can cause an allergic reaction. Christine Cole Johnson, PhD, has been studying allergies since the early 1980s. She found that babies born by cesarean section were more than six times more sensitive to dust allergens than natural born babies. She also found that having pets in the home before the child’s first birthday could prevent the child from developing allergies in the future. Johnson’s colleague, Dr. Haejin Kim, is an allergist. His latest study found that genetics has an impact on allergies. He says African-American children suffer from food allergies more than three times more often than white children. If African-American children have parents with allergies, their children have twice the risk of getting allergies as those whose parents do not have allergies. Jonathan Silverberg is a dermatologist at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. He recently analyzed data on 91,000 children and found that children born in foreign countries but who later lived in the United States were at a higher risk of developing allergies than children born in the United States. Scientists have also found that the environment plays a role in triggering allergic diseases. But which factors play a dominant role is still unclear to scientists. Spring is the season when allergic diseases are frequent. Especially pollen allergy. When pollen is dispersed in the air, it is very easy to be inhaled into the respiratory tract. People who have pollen allergies inhale these pollens and have an allergic reaction. The main symptoms of pollen allergy are sneezing, runny nose, watery eyes, itchy nose, eyes and external ear canal, and in severe cases, bronchitis, bronchial asthma and pulmonary heart disease.