Achoo! Pollen counter measures what’s making you sneeze

At 8 a.m. four days a week, from March to November, Rose Vrtis hikes up four flights of stairs to the roof of the Clinical Science Center. Although the roof vents make it hard to hear, and the surface’s black tar increases the surrounding temperature quite a bit, the view of Lake Mendota and the UW–Madison campus is breathtaking.

But Vrtis isn’t looking at the view. Instead, she focuses on what appears to be a small tripod with a metal box on top. Locked inside the box is 24 hours of minuscule data — information that can make or break an allergy-sufferer’s day. Vrtis, an associate researcher in the Department of Medicine, also is a certified pollen counter, providing pollen counts for the Madison area to the National Allergy Bureau.

Pollen counting is only a small part of Vrtis’ day, but it’s an important one. The majority of her work is in research on viral-induced asthma, which she performs for the Asthma, Allergy and Pulmonary Research Center. Many of the center’s studies revolve around both seasonal and year-round allergies and how they can affect asthma patients. And the pollen counts that she provides to the National Allergy Bureau, which reports pollen and mold-spore levels to the public, help allergy-sufferers and doctors monitor possible causes of allergy or cold-like symptoms. Allergists use the counts to determine the beginning and end of pollen season, which helps them make treatment recommendations and monitor allergy triggers for individual patients, says Vrtis.

Vrtis began working for the center in 1984, after finishing her degree in medical technology at UW–Madison. She became the area pollen counter in 1994 through a program administered by the Harvard Medical School. The process required her to collect pollen rods during three different months. She then performed a quantitative count on each rod, identifying various pollen types. She mailed her results to Harvard, which gave her a grade on her results; she had to pass all three rods to become certified.

“[Pollen-counting] allows me to watch for spring in a new way — I like to watch the trees begin to flower in the spring, and I see the tree pollen on the microscope at the same time,” says Vrtis. “Monitoring the pollen levels is another way to observe the arrival of spring, the change to summer and the end of the growing season in the fall when the pollen counts drop to zero.”

The work is intricate. The device on the roof is the RotoRod Sampler, which has a rotating arm impacter that captures particles from the air on one of two small, approximately inch-long plastic collection rods that are greased on one side. The rods spin for 30 seconds out of every 10 minutes during a 24-hour period and collect anything that might be floating in the air within an approximately 50-mile area. Not everything that shows up on the rods is pollen or mold, of course, but plenty of it is — and Vrtis identifies each particle under the microscope in her lab.

Although she has numerous reference books and specimen slides, Vrtis has learned to recognize many of the particles on sight. During the spring, there are about 12 different types of pollen that Vrtis looks for, and now, as summer begins to turn to fall, she is looking for ragweed, lamb’s quarters, pigweed or plantain weed, among others.

“I think it’s amazing that pollen from different plants looks different,” Vrtis says. “Ragweed pollen is unique in their size and appearance and looks different than grass pollen or oak tree pollen or pine tree pollen.”

Vrtis truly enjoys her research. “Every experiment is like a puzzle,” she says. “I like to design the experiment, obtain results and draw a conclusion — I like to solve the puzzle.” In addition to her work with pollen, Vrtis detects viruses and relates asthma to the amount of virus during a cold. She studies viral-induced asthma and natural colds, as well as colds that are given to people (willingly, of course) by the program. Many asthma suffers have both allergy triggered and viral induced asthma.

Studies are constantly under way at the center and can last for three to five years, and the center is always looking for research subjects. To learn more about the center or about current studies, visit the center’s web site.