Coping With Hay Fever in Prague

With its numerous green spaces, Prague is a great place to be in the spring and summer months. For hay-fever sufferers, however, this can be a miserable time.

Some relief is available for people struggling with pollen allergies in Prague, however, just as it is elsewhere in the world.

If the medication available over-the-counter from a pharmacy (lékárna) isn't doing the trick, for instance, you might want to see an allergy specialist (alergolog).

(Firmy.cz has a Czech-language listing of allergy specialists in Prague.)

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) Choices website advises sufferers to try staying indoors when pollen counts are at their highest -- typically the early morning, late afternoon and early evening.

If you do go out, the NHS suggests wearing wraparound shades, keeping car windows shut and showering and washing your hair when you get home.

If you know which particular type of pollen (pyl) you're allergic to, it's relative easy to keep track of the peak periods and take precautions accordingly.

Thanks to the efforts of the Česká pylová informační služba ("Czech Pollen Information Service"; PIS) and its 12 monitoring stations, information about high pollen counts (pylové informace) is widely reported in the Czech media, often alongside weather forecasts.

Information from the Czech-language PIS website is also available on the English-language section of Polleninfo.org, where Dr. Ondřej Rybníček posts regular updates about the current situation in the Czech Republic.

If you're away from your computer, the following list of translations should help you make sense of Czech-language pollen reports.