Pet Allergies: How to breathe clearly this Spring
A pet that is causing your child, you or anyone in your family to sneeze and wheeze, here are some tips you can do to help manage your symptoms.
Video Transcript
TANIA ELLIOTT: Do you sniffle and sneeze every spring? Fight off coughing fits around your furry friends? Did you know that pet allergies can actually make your spring allergies worse? Here's what you need to know to breathe clearly this season.
Pet allergies occur when you have an allergic reaction to something on the pet. Now that could be pet dander, fur, something on their skin. Pet allergies can trigger itching, sneezing, congestion, runny nose, asthma, coughing, and even rashes.
You can have an allergic reaction to any animal. We're talking dogs and cats, even birds. What causes allergies is something called histamine, which gets released any time your body is exposed to the allergen. Histamine is what's responsible for causing the itching, redness, swelling, and congestion.
So there are a number of ways to manage your pet allergy symptoms. One is to start taking allergy medicines, like an antihistamine or a steroid nasal spray. It can help turn off the allergy symptoms in your body.
The other thing you can do is avoid your triggers. So don't spend a ton of time holding, petting, or playing with the animal. You want to try to minimize that. And if you do interact with the animal, go ahead and take a shower. And just rinse everything off to get rid of all the potential allergens that you may have become exposed to.
If you have a pet that goes to the bathroom in the home, like a cat and there's kitty litter, or a bird and you need to clean out the bird cage, you may want to leave that task to somebody else because sometimes what you're allergic to could actually be in the urine for the feces.
There's no such thing as a hypoallergenic pet. So what I would recommend is do a bit of a test. If there's a pet that you're interested in getting, maybe you want to have a couple of days where you spend a lot of time with it. Just to make sure that you aren't having symptoms from that pet.
Imagine you're allergic to your dog and you're also allergic to tree pollen, which is the most common allergen in the springtime. If you let your dog outside, all of the pollen that's in the air can land on your dog and then come right back into the home. Wash your pet. You want to do it at least once a week because not only is it going to get rid of all of the outdoor pollen that the pet may have tracked in from the home, it's also going to get rid of the pet allergen itself.
If you have a pet and then your child develops allergies to the pet, the first thing you would want to do is take that child for an evaluation to confirm that it truly is a pet allergy. If it is, there are a few things that you can do and you don't necessarily need to get rid of the pet.
Number one is to create an allergy-free zone in the home. Ideally, that would be the child's bedroom, where the pet stays out of the bedroom. And then you can also put an air filter in the bedroom, so that in the event that pet allergen does become suspended in the air, the air purifier can help suck those allergens out of the air.
The other thing you can do is consider medicine for the child. I would recommend looking into allergy immunotherapy if you're planning to keep the pet around for a while because that could actually cure somebody of their allergies. If you have any kind of allergies, it's really important to talk with your doctor, get evaluated, and be put on the treatment plan that's right for you.
