When I woke up I was struggling to breathe. I was gasping.
It was very, very, scary not being able to breathe.
It's akin to trying to breathe through a straw.
You just can't get enough air in.
At 4am on the 25th of November last year, Peter Jones knew he needed urgent medical help.
And he wasn't the only one... That night, 90 people arrived at the emergency
department of The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, with severe respiratory problems.
There was actually quite a lot of mayhem in the hospital when I got there. There were a lot of people there.
Peter and the other patients were caught up in an epidemic of thunderstorm asthma - a rare phenomenon
that's caused by a perfect storm of weather conditions and airborne allergens.
As you'll see, it's an explosive mix.
Cenk Suphioglu identified the role ryegrass plays in Melbourne's thunderstorm asthma epidemics.
So that's the culprit?
Yes, this is the culprit. This is ryegrass.
You can see the anther popped out to release the pollen
so on days like this, during hay-fever season, they actually pop out and they release the pollen
which gets picked up by winds and taken for long distances.
In fact, during a thunderstorm, half a tonne of pollen per hectare can take flight.
But while it may inflict hay-fever in urban areas,
something else is needed to trigger thund erstorm asthma.
Pollen itself, even though we don't see it with the
naked eye, is too large to penetrate the lower airways.
So it actually gets trapped at the epiglottis; about here.
So for something to penetrate the lower airways - to cause asthma - you need smaller, micronic particles
less than five microns in diameter.
So what are these smaller particles? And how are they released into the air? ...Cenk's team answered that
by studying what happened when ryegrass pollen was exposed to the moisture in thunderstorms.
After it's been in contact with water, you can see that it's actually ruptured.
It really does look like it exploded out of that weak point.
It is under pressure and the rupture will actually release these contents like a projectile.
So it will actually allow it to get airborne.
This osmotic shock causes the pollen grain to release about seven hundred starch granules.
Each one is coated with & contains major allergens. And they're small enough to penetrate deep into our lungs.
On a day which had no record of rainfall in
the previous 24 hours we had approximately 1000 starch granules per cubic meter of air sampled.
But as soon as we had rainfall that actually
went to more than 54,000, so that's actually more than a 50 fold increase.
The phenomenon has been recorded in Australia and overseas,
but Melbourne has the dubious honour of being known as the thunderstorm asthma capital of the world
with three recorded epidemics since 1987. [recorded in 2011, before the 4th epidemic in 2016]
Melbourne is particularly a hotspot for this because when these pollens are being released,
(they) are picked up by northerly winds and all of
the growth is in the northern parts of Victoria, and the northerly winds pick them up and bring
them into the metropolitan area where most of us are,
and then you have the perfect model system for thunderstorm-induced asthma.
So, thunderstorm asthma is an allergic reaction to grass pollen
and you don't have to be asthmatic to get it.
In fact, seasonal hay-fever sufferers like Peter are most at risk.
I think because it was the first time I've had an asthma attack, I am now aware of asthma
more than I was before. But I certainly didn't take it seriously.
You need to take it very, very seriously.