Living with allergies

The primary goal of allergy treatment is preventing symptoms from occurring in the first place. If we start learning about allergies, understanding what triggers allergic symptoms and avoiding the allergens, that’s to me, is the most important aspect of prevention and treatment of allergies. Since air quality varies widely around the United States, some websites have become a useful information tools to find out what you are allergic to and give you information about pollutants, ozone, or pollen counts in your area on any given day. Moreover, this information can now be personalized and be sent to patient’s iPhone and iPod Touch.

For instance this website http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/10/pollen.tools/index.html, listed some useful websites that are good information tools you can use.
· daily mold and pollen report
Is a site developed by The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology’s National Allergy Bureau to report daily mold and pollen report.

· The Weather Channel https://registration.weather.com/ursa/alerts/step1?
Sign up for pollen alerts that can be sent to you via email or text message. You just plug in your information and select the time of day you want the alerts, and how often.

· The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology
The AAAAI's National Allergy Bureau offers an interactive map http://www.aaaai.org/nab/index.cfm?p=pollen that allows users to click on a location for current pollen and mold levels in that area. This same service also allows people with allergies to sign up for email alerts http://www.aaaai.org/nab/index.cfm?p=MyNAB with trees, weeds, grass, and mold counts from their local monitoring center.

· http://www.pollen.com/
This website offers a wealth of interactive, personalized information on pollen counts. It boasts a free Allergy Alert application http://pollen.com/iphone.asp for iPhone and iPod Touch users that supplies one- or four-day forecasts in four categories: allergies (i.e., pollen), cold and cough, asthma, and ultraviolet rays. A sister site, PollenWidgets.com http://pollenwidgets.com/, also offers widgets for daily or four-day pollen counts available through Yahoo Widgets or Google Gadgets.

· Pollen Report iPhone app
This app http://www.apple.com/webapps/weather/pollenreport.html updates users on pollen levels in a specific area code. Also you can get the local high and low temperatures, too.

· http://www.airnow.gov/
This site, run by federal government agencies, doesn't have a pollen watcher, but you can use it to check local levels of ozone http://airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=airnow.local, a pollutant that can make it harder for people with asthma to breathe. The site also provides a daily Air Quality Index as well as email notifications http://www.enviroflash.info/.
You can even access webcams http://airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=airnow.webcams to get a real-time look at local haze conditions.

It is difficult to function normally on a daily basis for millions of people suffering from these allergies. I am sure these websites will be useful prevention and treatment tools for many of them. The internet has made this information available to everybody at everywhere on this planet, so it is no longer a local health news which were formally published on local newspapers or broadcast on local TV stations or radios. The internet has made it possible for more people to gather health information and to tap into more resources on a large scale that was never thought possible before.

My Goal

My academic goal is to be a clinical pathologist. I am very happy to discover that UC Davis now offer Health Informatics classes online. I have waited for more than two years to attend such a program. As a software engineer and experienced mathematics teacher and having worked in mental health department as an application analyst, I discovered certain inefficiencies in the handling of medical records in healthcare organization. How the organization lose a lot of money and lack of follow-up of their patients due to improper record keeping.
After completing the first class which is the introduction to Health Informatics, it was interesting to know how health informatics can solve these overdue problems. I look forward to gain a vast knowledge and ideas from this certificate program.