The Pollen Detectives of Charlotte – Charlotte Magazine

“I have a nice little mold on there,” Michelle Gay tells me, “if you’d like to take a look.”

Not the kind of offer I ordinarily jump at. But I’m in Carolina Asthma & Allergy Center’s laboratory in SouthPark to learn how the practice gathers information for its Pollen Counter, an online resource that shares daily pollen and mold levels for Charlotte. I sidle up to the microscope with the awkwardness of someone who avoided taking a single lab in college and peer through the eyepieces to behold … a blob. It’s surprisingly pretty—fuchsia, from the dye they use to make the spores easier to see. It’s also larger than I expected, taking up about a fourth of the viewfinder.

“Yeah, that mold’s pretty big,” Brendan Janssen says as he tucks some hair from his undercut behind his gauged ear. Janssen, 42, is CAAC’s laboratory manager. He pulls a white binder off a shelf and flips it open to a page with a grid of 12 enlarged mold spore photos. Each spore looks different—some are round, some elongated, some smooth-edged, some fuzzy. “There’s practically a book full of ’em,” he says. So many that his team doesn’t bother to categorize them beyond “mold.” They do, however, distinguish types of pollen. In addition to differentiating grass, weed, and tree pollens, they also track and report the individual species of the latter two, like oak tree or ragweed pollens.

CAAC, founded in 1952, has 16 offices, which makes it the largest allergy and asthma practice in the Charlotte area. It began counting pollen in the 1990s under the leadership of one of its physicians, Dr. John Klimas, who believed doctors and patients could best manage symptoms by knowing which allergens we have. CAAC began publishing the daily counts on its website. Now, as climate change lengthens our region’s allergy season, Charlotteans can check the Pollen Counter like they check the weather forecast to prepare for the day: Do they need to take antihistamines, limit time outside, or change clothes or shower when they come back inside? 

“Did you find any pines on there today?” Janssen asks Gay, referring to pollen from pine trees, as he leans around a cubical divider to see her desk.

“No, unfortunately, none today.” 

“Aw!” Janssen laments as he stands back up. “Those are good.” (I’m allergic to pine, among many other things, so I don’t share his disappointment.) He flips through the white binder again, to a page of pine pollen spores. They look like they’re made from three overlapping circles, like little Mickey Mouse heads. Janssen explains his affinity for them: They’re the easiest to spot because they’re so large.

The “Mickey Mouse heads” of pine tree pollen spores in the lab’s white identification binder.

He peers into the microscope again. “It did rain yesterday, so all counts are low,” he says as he repositions the slide, “but there’s still some good stuff in here.” 

Each morning the CAAC SouthPark office is open during allergy season, one of four laboratory staff—Janssen, Gay, and two others—spend up to two hours counting mold and pollen spores, even though they all have other duties. Is it worth the time?

CAAC appears to be the only clinic in the state that conducts regular pollen counts, even though the data is more valuable than ever. For the past decade, Charlotte has ranked between 30th and 60th on the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America’s list of the 100 most challenging U.S. cities for allergy sufferers.

It makes sense considering our city’s tree-, grass-, and weed-filled green spaces, part of what attracts more than 110 people to move here each day. “But when people move,” says Hannah Jaffee, an AAFA research manager, “they’re exposed to allergens that they haven’t been exposed to before, and they can develop new allergies.” Many of CAAC’s patients are originally from other parts of the country, and Janssen says the practice regularly receives emails and comments from people who appreciate the Pollen Counter. 

That’s more than enough motivation for Janssen and his team. At 8 a.m. each day, he or his team members collect pollen and mold spores from a machine called a Rotorod Pollen Sampler so they can publish results before 10 a.m. (They used to start the process at 6 a.m. to publish by 8 a.m., but staffing concerns forced them to push it later.) When Janssen first points to it from a window of CAAC’s fifth-floor office in Fairview Plaza, it takes me a few beats to figure out what he’s pointing to. It’s a metal pole attached to the top of a two-story concrete parking structure. I would’ve assumed it was an electrical pole or part of the parking structure itself.

Before we go down to get a closer look, Janssen prepares the next pollen collection rod—a clear plastic stick about the diameter and half the length of a toothpick—by coating it in clear silicone grease. Each day, one of these rods is inserted into a retracting head on the Rotorod. Every nine minutes over a 24-hour period, the machine protracts the rod and spins it quickly for 60 seconds. The grease on the rod traps pollen and mold spores in the air. 

The procedure: Lab manager Brendan Janssen prepares a collection rod with silicone grease, then loads the rod into a spring-loaded arm on the pollen collector, hand-cranks the Rotorod machine into position, and adjusts the settings to spin the rod for 60 seconds every nine minutes over 24 hours.

Janssen carries the greasy little rod as we ride the elevator, exit the building, and squeeze between parked cars. When we reach the machine, he removes a padlock on a hand crank. As he turns it, the retractable head moves down the pole so he that can reach it, remove the rod with the last day’s sample on it, and replace it with the new one. 

“Sometimes the rod gets bug bits on there, or bits of plants besides pollen,” Janssen tells me as he switches it out. I’m glad to see today’s rod appears relatively bit-free.

Janssen’s mild-mannered and soft-spoken, and his scientific explanations can sound like they’re being read from a manual, so it’s delightful each time he drops an off-handed comment about something like bug bits. He’s been at CAAC for 12 years. He previously worked as a nurse at an outpatient counseling center for seniors before a friend of his from UNC Charlotte’s nursing school suggested Janssen join him at CAAC. He’s worked his way up from an allergy-injection nurse to his role leading this laboratory, which serves all 16 CAAC offices.

Janssen, or whoever’s counting pollen on a given day, drips a pink Gram stain onto the day’s rod when it comes off the machine—that’s what turns the spores bright pink for easier counting. Janssen’s counted pollen for about six years, so he can identify many spores easily and immediately. But no two spores look exactly the same, he says, so at times, he still has to consult the white binder. “Sometimes you’re going, It kind of looks like that. Kinda. But … Spores aren’t always 100% textbook.”

When he identifies a type, he writes it down and then makes tally marks by it as he counts. Once finished, he plugs the counts into an Excel sheet set up to calculate the total pollen count with a formula that also accounts for the time the rod was outside, “plus a fun calculation from the manufacturers of the machine that involves the rotation speed to calculate the cubic air.” Janssen chuckles quietly. “It’s, yeah, time-consuming.” 

“What does that mean?” I ask before Janssen and I leave the Rotorod on the parking deck on the day I visit. Someone has written the word “SNOOD!,” and underlined it three times, on the pole of the machine. 

“Yeah, somebody marked on the pole,” he says. “I’m actually unsure what that means—”

We turn to walk back toward the building. 

“You know, I should probably actually Google that,” he says. He whips his iPhone from his pocket and starts typing as we walk. “Snood, definition,” he reads. “It’s a hairnet from the ’60s. … Or headgear. … Oh, there’s something called ‘snood football.’” 

I’m laughing.

“You know what, I’m gonna end up in a hole there,” he says. “I better stop.” He clicks off his phone and slides it back into the pocket of his khakis.

Tess Allen is the associate editor.