Kansas Senior Press Service News ArticlesKansas Senior Press Service News ArticlesBy Shari Tedford
Kansas Senior Press Service
Allergies are a misguided reaction of your immune system, your body’s way of protecting itself from foreign substances.
The body’s immune system makes antibodies to fight allergens because it identifies them as harmful, even when they are completely harmless. Seasonal allergies, such as hay fever or allergic rhinitis, are generally caused by outside triggers or allergens, which put the body’s immune system into overdrive. The biggest culprit is pollen.
Pollen can cause the release of histamines and other substances that in turn cause allergy symptoms. Symptoms vary and can affect various parts of the body — skin, airways, sinuses, digestive system. Typical seasonal allergy symptoms include itchy or runny nose; congestion; itchy, watery eyes; and itchy mouth, throat or ears. Sufferers of seasonal allergies may also experience fatigue, weakness, skin reactions, and intermittent asthma. Many treatments exist to curb the symptoms, but there are no cures.
With spring dramatically upon us, many people will start to sense Mother Nature as things burst into blossom and will start to pay attention to pollen counts, which vary with geographical locale, climate and plant species. A pollen count is reported as grains of pollen per square meter of air, collected over 24 hours. The number represents the concentration of all the pollen in the air in a certain area at a specific time.
In the United States and Canada, pollen allergies generally follow this pattern: Tree pollen is prevalent mostly in early to middle spring, grass pollen is prevalent mostly in late spring and early summer, and weed pollen is prevalent mostly from late summer to early fall.
Prevention
Avoiding allergens is almost impossible with seasonal allergies, even if you stay inside 24/7. But here are some steps to reduce seasonal triggers to pollens:
Treatment
The best way to control your seasonal allergies is to avoid the things that trigger them. When it comes to treatment, over-the-counter and prescription medications can help:
Many over-the-counter allergy medications can interact with prescription medications related to chronic health issues such as glaucoma, blood pressure, heart disease and depression. Senior adults need to check with their physician or pharmacist before trying over-the-counter medications for their seasonal allergies.
An alternative to medication that you might consider is nasal irrigation with a combination of warm water, a quarter-teaspoon of salt and a quarter-teaspoon of baking soda. That may help clean irritants out of the nose, clear out mucus and open sinus passages. You can administer the solution through a squeeze bottle or a neti pot — a device that looks like a small teapot. Some people have found nasal irrigation superior to medications.
Above all, be confident: You and your physician can work together to find the best solution for your seasonal allergies!
Shari Tedford, RN, BAN, is senior wellness coordinator with the Johnson County Health Department’s Health Education Division.
By Gene Meyer
Kansas Senior Press Service
You would take a bullet for your children, of course. But lend them money? That’s trickier.
Loaning our grown children money to help with small or even not-so-small emergencies is a natural impulse for many older adults, experts say. Nearly four in 10 persons age 60 or older lend or give money to their adult children, researchers at the Pew Research Center found a few years ago.
The numbers get bigger when pollsters ask about specific kinds of help. More than two-thirds of parents recently surveyed by Ameriprise Financial say they are helping grown children pay off some mortgage-sized college loans. About half have fronted cash to help buy a new car, and about one-third help with routine living expenses.
Timely loans can be financial life savers when they work, helping an out-of-work son or daughter make a mortgage payment, for instance, or helping a grandchild go to college. The trouble is, the loans can blow up bigger than bum deals on Wall Street in terms of damage to your own retirement savings and to family harmony when they don’t work.
Here are ways that credit counselors, financial planners and retirement plan wealth managers suggest for avoiding some of the biggest potential traps:
First, consider your own needs, says TIAA-CREFF, the teachers pension fund and retirement plan giant in New York. Are you positioned to retire comfortably? Where would the money come from? Loaning your retirement savings should be your last choice, because seniors now can expect to live into their late 80s and beyond. What might you have to borrow or sell to help a struggling child? Can you afford that?
Also think about precedents you are setting. If you lend to one child, would you be able to help your other children if they turned to you as well? Realize that lending money to one child can create unimaginable jealousy and long-term bitterness if you don’t treat your children equally.
Consider what kind of loan your child needs and how good a credit risk he might be, other experts say. Helping out with, say, mortgage or college money that is likely to improve your child’s future wealth is better than bailing him out of debt or putting up-front money to start an uncertain business. One good gauge of how good a loan might be is to find out whether a commercial lender would make the loan if your borrower asked, says the Financial Planners Association in Denver.
Unless your borrower wants just a few hundred dollars for a very specific purpose and a very short time, you probably should put the loan agreement in writing, with explicit terms for paying the funds back and an appropriate amount of interest, other authorities say. Putting the agreement in writing will head off potential quarrels if either your circumstances or your child’s change before you get the money back. It also may help you avoid a potential tax jam if a lot of money is involved.
The Internal Revenue Service worries about the potential for families to use large, low-interest “loans” to make end runs around assorted rules and limitations on gift, estate or other taxes while passing wealth to younger generations.
Let’s say you lend your daughter money to buy a home or buy into a good business opportunity. The IRS may require you to charge a minimal interest rate, called the applicable federal rate. If you charge below that rate or make an interest-free loan, IRS could count the difference as taxable income to your child, and could count the loan as subject to a gift tax you would pay.
Applicable federal rates, which rise and fall with rates on U.S. Treasury securities, are very low right now: 0.83 percent on loans for three years or less, 3.67 percent on nine-year or longer loans, and 2.15 percent for anything in between. That leaves room to make below-market-cost loans to your kids and still avoid the tax complications.
But if you choose to do that, the experts say, talk with a tax adviser and put everything in writing.
Gene Meyer, a Fairway resident and former staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal and The Kansas City Star, reports and writes about financial topics at www.kitchentablenomics.com/.
<Sidebar>
Learning more about loans to adult children
AARP—www.aarp.org/money
AARP’s Money page links to articles covering a range of financial issues that people 50 and older deal with and offers planning calculators to help you gauge retirement income needs.
K-State Extension and Research—www.oznet.ksu.edu
Click on “Business and Economics” for information about handling many family financial questions. You may also contact your local county extension office.
Financial Planning Association—www.fpanet.org
Click on “General Public” for information about long-range strategies for building or preserving retirement savings. You can reach the organization’s Kansas City chapter at www.fpakc.org.
By
Kansas Senior Press Service
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides a one-time payment of $250 to more than 50 million Social Security beneficiaries and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries, with the exception of those receiving Medicaid in care facilities.
Payments began in early May and continued throughout the month. To receive the payment, individuals must have been eligible for Social Security or SSI during November 2008, December 2008 or January 2009.
The legislation also provides for a one-time payment to Veterans Affairs (VA) and Railroad Retirement Board (RRB) beneficiaries. The VA and RRB will be responsible for payments under their programs. However, if someone receives Social Security and SSI, VA, or RRB benefits, only one $250 payment will be made.
The Social Security Administration urges you not to call about your payment unless you have not received it by Thursday, June 4.
After June 4, you can call 1-800-772-1213 (TTY 1-800-325-0778)), or contact your local Social Security office to let them know your payment has not arrived. Please wait until then to ask about your payment because the Department of the Treasury will be sending payments until the end of May.
The payment is automatic, no application is needed, no e-mail response is necessary, there is no fee, and no help is required to obtain the payment. If you suspect that you are being subjected to fraud or a scam in relation to the payment, call 800-269-0271 between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. Central Time.
By Barbara Watkins
Kansas Senior Press Service
June is a month for serious hiking. The weather has settled down and the pesky insects are not yet out. It is also a fine time to savor Donald Worster’s excellent new biography, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford University Press, 2008). Worster is the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Professor of History at the University of Kansas, specializing in U.S. and environmental history.
John Muir was a Scot by birth and by temperament. Because this is my heritage, too, I enjoyed reading about his family’s strict discipline, the rigors and pitfalls of his Calvinist upbringing and how that upbringing shaped his perspectives on nature and wilderness. When he hiked, he packed frugally; he typically carried three freshly baked loaves of bread and a bottle of water on the trail. Although he traveled widely, Muir would remain a Lowland Scot all his days.
The book begins in summer 1877, as Muir takes off for a long, solitary hike near Pasadena, Calif.:
Although he was nearly forty years old, he was still relatively unknown to the world. It would be a decade or two before he became celebrated as the nation’s most ardent lover of wild places, the founding president of the Sierra Club, and the author of popular articles and books on the mountains of California and the national parks. It would be another century before historians looked to him as the greatest forerunner of modern environmentalism, a powerful influence on people far beyond the West Coast and even beyond America’s shores.
Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, and his family emigrated to the Wisconsin wilderness in 1848. Worster draws on Muir’s autobiographical The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Houghton Mifflin, 1913) to describe his father’s stern discipline, which included thrashings and sermons. As Muir commented on his family, “We were all made slaves through the vice of over-industry.”
Muir in his youth was a consummate inventor. His self-setting sawmill and scythe-thermometer were efforts to improve on nature and help “discipline the lazy human body.” Given the chaotic state of the world at that time, no invention could help him prepare for the future. At the University of Wisconsin in the early 1860s, Muir came under the influence of Prof. Ezra Carr and his wife, Jeanne. Making contacts with helpful mentors and partners in various environmental activities and causes would be a trademark of his adult life.
In 1861, while working in a factory in Indianapolis after he dropped out of college, Muir became temporarily blind in one eye in an industrial accident. This caused him to rethink his life and to take off on a walking tour from Indiana to Florida (his journals were posthumously published in 1916 by Houghton Mifflin as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf) and then crossing Panama to settle in California, which he would call home for the rest of his life.
Jeanne Carr introduced Muir in 1874 to the Strentzels, a Polish family who had settled near Martinez, Calif., in the gold rush days. The father, a physician by training, became a successful horticulturalist. Muir married their daughter, Louisa, and took over management of the family orchards. He also began writing articles on California mountains for national magazines. Despite his family and business responsibilities, especially after the birth of his two daughters, he left home on several occasions for long trips into the wilderness.
Some of my favorite parts of the book deal with his trips to Alaska, particularly Glacier Bay, which I have visited. Muir was the first to write about this area, and an inlet and glacier are named after him. He shared with his Indian guides an “eager, childlike attention” to nature. On one occasion on his first Alaska trip, he foolishly risked his life and that of a little dog, Stickeen, that accompanied him on a hike across a glacier. His account of the dog’s bravery became one of his best-selling books.
In 1892 he helped found the Sierra Club, which he served as president for the rest of his life. His books attracted the attention of Pres. Theodore Roosevelt and other powerful national leaders who joined in promoting innovative conservation programs to protect our natural resources. Muir was deeply involved in the creation of Yosemite, Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest, and Grand Canyon national parks.
Ever the intrepid traveler, he set off at age 73, alone, for a ramble around the world that would last almost a year. Before his death in 1914, Muir dealt with personal and family health issues, helped support struggling members of his extended family, and continued to wrestle with the politics and moral issues of preserving the national parks and forests.
In his concluding remarks, Worster poses some of the same challenges for all of us:
Whether Muir’s deep faith in nature is still possible in our own time is a question that his admirers must continue to ask themselves and to find answers of their own. Can contact with nature inspire people to a high ethic, a greater decency? Or is the human species by and large incapable of reverence, restraint, generosity, or vision? Have we truly learned to respect a nature that we did not create, a world independent of us, or do we see only the hand of humankind wherever we look? … Looking back at the trail he blazed, we must wonder how far we have yet to go.
I and many others who share Muir’s passion for nature hope that we can answer these questions for the benefit of future generations.
Other Books by John Muir and Donald Worster
In addition to his autobiography, Muir wrote 11 books, some published posthumously. They include The Mountains of California (New York: The Century Co., 1894); Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909); and Edward Henry Harriman, which describes his complex relationship with the nation’s most powerful railroad baron and a prominent lobbyist for national parks (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1911). The Sierra Club has published electronic texts of Muir’s writings at www.sierraclub.org.
Worster’s books include A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell, 2001; Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West, 1992; and Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, 1979 (reissued in a 25th anniversary edition in 2004). All are published by Oxford University Press.
Barbara Watkins, retired from University of Kansas Continuing Education, is an avid and accomplished gardener, birder, and director of outdoor excursions — preferably involving wine.
These articles are also available electronically at the Center on Aging Website: http://www2.kumc.edu/coa/Senior_Press_Article/Topic_Index.htm