Pet allergy in children: what the evidence establishes before an Indian family gives the animal away

What the allergen actually is, and why it is not hair

The allergen is a set of proteins in saliva, skin and urine, not the hair itself. Hair is only the delivery vehicle, which is why a short coat, a clipped coat or no coat at all changes very little.

Animal allergens are typically found in urine, saliva, skin and faeces, and are carried on hair and dander, the tiny scales shed from skin, hair or feathers. For dogs the Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine is blunt about the common misconception. The primary dog allergen is produced in the salivary glands, which makes saliva the main source, the allergen is deposited on the coat through licking, and once the fur dries the particles flake off and become airborne.

In cats, one protein does almost all the work. Fel d 1 is responsible for over 90 percent of allergic sensitisations to cats. Dogs are messier. Eight main allergens have been characterised in each species, and in dogs the clinically important ones spread across Can f 1 and Can f 2, which are lipocalins, Can f 3, which is serum albumin, and Can f 5 Mattsson L, Lundgren T, Everberg H.

Can f 5 deserves its own line, because it is the one most people have never heard of and the one that changes advice. It is prostatic kallikrein, made in the prostate of male dogs and found in dog urine and dander. When it was first characterised, recombinant Can f 5 bound IgE antibodies from 26 of 37 sera from people with dog allergy, and 14 of those 26 reacted to none of Can f 1, Can f 2 or Can f 3. A standard whole-extract test can therefore miss the exact protein a person reacts to.

Why vacuuming more is only part of the answer

Allergens from pets are small and lightweight, so once airborne they stay suspended for long periods before settling onto carpets, bedding, furniture and other items, and people carry them out of the house on hair and clothing. That last point has been measured directly: clothing is a carrier of cat allergen, and human hair is itself an unexpected source of exposure.

Two consequences follow for an Indian home. The first is that cleaning method matters more than cleaning frequency. Dry cleaning with a broom or a feather duster aerosolises pet allergen rather than removing it, while damp cloths and mops trap it, which is a point in favour of the pocha over the jhadu. The second is that most Indian households do not own the tool the foreign advice assumes. A survey of 150 allergy patients' homes in Assam collected its dust by hand precisely because vacuum cleaners are not used in the majority of Indian homes.

The hypoallergenic breed claim, and the two studies that tested it

No dog breed is hypoallergenic, and two published studies measured it rather than asserting it. One found more allergen on the hypoallergenic breeds, the other found no difference in the homes those dogs lived in.

Dutch researchers compared Can f 1 in hair and coat samples from so-called hypoallergenic breeds, meaning the Labradoodle, Poodle, Spanish Waterdog and Airedale terrier, against Labrador retrievers and a control group. The hypoallergenic group (n=196) carried a geometric mean of 2.26 micrograms of Can f 1 per gram of hair against 0.77 in the control group (n=160), and 27.04 against 12.98 in coat samples. The marketed breeds carried more of the allergen, not less.

The same paper records the finding that actually decides the question for a buyer. Differences between breeds were small relative to the variability within a breed, Can f 1 in settled floor dust was lower only for Labradoodles with no difference between the other groups, and no differences in airborne levels were found between breeds at all. Its conclusion is one sentence long. There is no evidence for the classification of certain dog breeds as being hypoallergenic.

An American birth cohort attacked it from the other end, measuring dust from the floor of the baby's bedroom in 173 one-dog homes in Detroit. Of those, 163 (94.2 percent) had detectable Can f 1. Four separate schemes for classifying a dog as hypoallergenic, including the American Kennel Club's own list, produced no statistically significant difference in either the proportion of homes with detectable allergen or the level where it was detectable. Where dogs were kept out of the sampled room, homes with hypoallergenic dogs consistently had higher Can f 1, though not significantly so.

The veterinary position is the same. All dogs produce allergens, the level varies between individual dogs but not by gender, breed or breed mix, allergen production is unrelated to hair type or length, even hairless dogs produce allergens, and in spite of advertising claims and higher prices, no dogs are truly hypoallergenic. The production of Can f 1 to Can f 6 varies between breeds, between anatomical sites on the same dog, and between individual dogs of the same breed.

What the Indian search results sell instead

Searching hypoallergenic dog breeds india from an Indian connection on 21 October 2026 returned, in the top nine, a US veterinary hospital listicle, a Scribd upload titled 57 Hypoallergenic Dog Breeds, a Petfinder breed list, two Pinterest boards, an Economic Times slideshow on low-shedding breeds that calls the Poodle hypoallergenic, a US SPCA blog and a pet-tag site. One page in the ten, VCA Animal Hospitals, states that there is no universal hypoallergenic dog breed. Not one result cited either of the two studies above.

The other direction: early animal exposure and lower allergy rates

Several large cohorts find lower rates of allergy and asthma in children who lived with animals in their first year, and in two of them the effect gets stronger as the number of animals rises. One good study finds the opposite for pet-specific allergy, and both belong on this page.

A Detroit birth cohort followed healthy full-term infants to a mean age of 6.7 years, with 474 of the original 835 completing the evaluation. Any positive skin prick test to six common aeroallergens was present in 33.6 percent of children with no dog or cat in the first year, 34.3 percent with one, and 15.4 percent with two or more (P=.005). After adjustment for cord serum IgE, sex, older siblings, parental smoking, parental asthma, bedroom dust mite levels at age two and current pet ownership, exposure to two or more dogs or cats in the first year carried an adjusted odds ratio of 0.23 (95% CI 0.09-0.60) for atopy.

A Swedish pair of cohorts put a dose on it. In a cross-sectional study of 1,029 children aged 7 to 8, allergy ever fell from 49 percent in those with no pets in the first year of life to zero in those with five or more (P for trend 0.038), and allergy in the last year from 32 percent to zero (P for trend 0.006). Sensitisation to animals and to pollens also fell as the number of household animals rose, and the same pattern appeared in a clinically evaluated birth cohort of 249 children.

The largest study is a Swedish national registry linkage covering every child born in the country between 2001 and 2010, 1,011,051 in total. Among 276,298 school-aged children, 22,629 of them exposed to a dog in their first year, dog exposure was associated with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.87 (95% CI 0.81-0.93) for asthma in the seventh year of life. Farm animal exposure was stronger still, at 0.47 (95% CI 0.30-0.74).

Where the evidence disagrees, and what that means for a family expecting a baby

A Finnish population study reached the opposite conclusion about pet-specific allergy. Working from the national population register, it identified all 4,779 children aged 1 to 4 in South Karelia, obtained questionnaire data from 3,024 of them, and merged it with every skin prick and specific IgE result in the area's patient records. The adjusted relative incidence of a positive test was 2.69 (95% CI 1.45-5.02) for dog allergens and 5.03 (95% CI 2.47-10.2) for cat allergens among children exposed to that pet alone, independent of the parents' own allergies.

Do not average those two findings. They are measuring different things over different time windows. The Finnish study measured test positivity in the first four years, the Swedish and American cohorts measured clinical allergy and asthma at ages 6 to 9, and the Finnish authors say explicitly that longer follow-up is required before anyone recommends early pet contact as a way of preventing pet allergy.

The Swedish registry adds two honest qualifications of its own. There was no association between dog exposure and asthma in children under three (hazard ratio 1.03, 95% CI 1.00-1.07), with the risk reduction appearing only from age three onwards (0.90, 95% CI 0.83-0.99), and preschool children exposed to dogs had a higher rate of pneumonia (1.13, 95% CI 1.06-1.20) and of other lower respiratory tract disease (1.06, 95% CI 1.00-1.13).

Before you blame the pet: what else is in an Indian home

Rule out house dust mite first, because it outscores every other indoor allergen in most published Indian skin-prick series, and because an Indian climate suits it far better than it suits a European one.

Start with how common allergic disease already is here, independent of any animal. The Global Asthma Network Phase I study in India surveyed 20,084 children aged 6 to 7, 25,887 adolescents aged 13 to 14 and 81,296 of their parents, through centres whose investigators were based in Pune, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Mysuru, New Delhi, Bikaner, Kottayam and Kolkata. Allergic rhinitis prevalence was 7.7 percent (95% CI 7.4-8.1) in the younger children, 23.5 percent (95% CI 23.0-24.1) in adolescents and 9.8 percent in adults, and eczema 2.5, 3.5 and 9.9 percent respectively.

Note which risk factor that study found strongest. Allergic rhinitis or eczema in either parent strongly predicted the same condition in their adolescent child, and across all three age groups genetic factors had the strongest association. Nearly a quarter of Indian adolescents report allergic rhinitis, and the single best predictor of it is a parent with the same thing, not a dog.

Then look at what Indian patients actually test positive to. A retrospective series at an allergy centre in West Bengal skin-tested 605 patients and found 524 positive to one or more aeroallergens, with Dermatophagoides farinae at 84.92 percent and Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus at 80.34 percent, ahead of Cocos pollen at 73.28 percent and Azadirachta at 57.25 percent, and the most reactive mould, Alternaria alternata, at 26.9 percent. A south Indian series of 546 patients at a tertiary centre in Mysore, Karnataka, found house dust mite at 65 to 70 percent, trees at 52 to 56 percent and cockroaches at 39 to 53 percent, with cockroach sensitisation significantly lower in suburban and rural under-21s than urban ones.

Where two Indian studies disagree, and why you should know

A paediatric study at a tertiary chest clinic in northern India skin-tested 180 asthmatic children aged 5 to 18 and reported a completely different ranking. Of those children, 100 (55.6 percent) were sensitised to at least one aeroallergen and 68 (37.8 percent) to more than one, but the leaders were housefly antigen at 36.7 percent and rice grain dust at 31.1 percent, with cockroach at 18.3 percent and house dust mite at only 7.8 percent. That is a tenth of the mite rate in the West Bengal adults.

We are publishing both rather than picking one. The panels differ, the ages differ, the regions differ and northern India is drier than coastal West Bengal, and none of those explanations has been tested against the other. The practical reading for a parent is narrower and safer than either paper: whichever Indian series you take, an animal is not at the top of it, and a doctor choosing a test panel for your child should be choosing one that fits where you live.

Why the Indian climate favours the mite

Mites grow well in house dust at 25 degrees Celsius and 80 percent relative humidity, and the Assam survey was carried out where average temperature and relative humidity run at 29 to 32 degrees and 90 to 94 percent. Its mite counts peaked between June and August, which accounted for 37.7 percent of the year's total, and correlated with monthly mean rainfall (r=0.783, P<.05) and monthly mean maximum temperature (r=0.775, P<.05). If a child's symptoms get worse every monsoon, that pattern fits a humid-season mite bloom better than it fits an animal that is in the house all year.

Two more findings from that survey are directly actionable. Mite populations were highest in RCC buildings with concrete walls, floors and roofs, next highest in semi-RCC Assam-type houses and lowest in wooden ones, and in 88 percent of the homes the floor dust held more mites than the bed dust. The paper also records that before it, Indian indoor dust-mite surveys had been confined largely to West Bengal and Maharashtra, so the national picture is still thin.

• House dust mite, which thrives in Indian humidity and dominates most published Indian skin-prick series Sharma D, Dutta BK.
• Cockroach allergen, at 18.3 percent of asthmatic children in the New Delhi series and 39 to 53 percent of patients in the Mysore series.
• Mould, with Alternaria alternata the most reactive in West Bengal at 26.9 percent, and fungal sensitisation higher in rural residents than urban ones.
• Pollen, including Cocos at 73.28 percent and Azadirachta at 57.25 percent in West Bengal, which varies sharply by city and season.
• Indoor smoke from agarbatti and mosquito coils, and outdoor particulates, which irritate airways and worsen symptoms regardless of what the child is sensitised to.

One honest gap. We looked for an Indian study reporting dog or cat dander sensitisation with a denominator alongside those figures and could not find one on Europe PMC on 21 October 2026. The published Indian panels report mites, pollens, fungi, cockroach, housefly and rice grain dust. That is not evidence that Indian children do not react to animals. It is evidence that nobody here has measured how often they do, and it is a reason to treat any confident Indian figure about pet allergy rates with suspicion.

How allergy testing works, and what a positive result does not mean

Allergy testing measures sensitisation, meaning the presence of IgE antibodies against an allergen. It does not by itself establish that the allergen is making your child ill, and that gap is the single most common reason a pet gets blamed wrongly.

Four test types are in routine use. A skin prick test introduces small amounts of allergen into the skin and the reaction is read after about 15 minutes. An intradermal test injects a small amount under the skin for more sensitive testing. A specific IgE blood test measures allergen-specific antibodies and is used when skin testing is not possible. A patch test identifies contact allergies over 48 to 72 hours. Antihistamines usually have to be stopped before skin testing because they interfere with the result.

Sensitisation is not the same as allergy

The Finnish population study demonstrates the gap inside a single dataset. Early dog exposure raised the adjusted relative incidence of a positive test to 2.69 (95% CI 1.45-5.02), but the adjusted prevalence odds ratio for a physician-diagnosed dog allergy in the same children was 1.75 with a confidence interval of 0.77 to 3.79, which crosses one. Test positivity moved clearly. Diagnosed illness did not.

A diagnosis needs the test result and a clear correlation between symptoms and exposure to that specific allergen. Polysensitisation across several dog and cat components is associated with a high likelihood of symptoms on exposure, and component-resolved diagnosis is useful specifically as a marker of increased asthma risk and disease severity rather than as a yes-or-no answer Schoos AM, Nwaru BI. Even the veterinary handout aimed at dog owners says to see a doctor rather than assume, so that you direct prevention at the correct cause of the symptoms.

The Can f 5 question, and why the dog's sex can matter

A Danish randomised double-blind trial took 22 adolescents aged 15 to 18 from a birth cohort, measured specific IgE to dog dander and to the components Can f 1, 2, 3 and 5, then challenged them with dander collected separately from male and female dogs. Seven of the 22 were monosensitised to Can f 5. All seven had a positive skin prick test to male dog extract and one of the seven also reacted to female dog extract (P=.01), and five of the seven had a positive conjunctival provocation to male dog extract against one of seven to female (P=.03). Children sensitised to a mix of components reacted the same way to both.

The authors put it carefully, as suggesting tolerance to female dogs. It is a small trial and it is not a licence to buy a female puppy on the strength of it. What it does justify is a specific question to an allergist before anyone rehomes a male dog, because exposure to a male dog is itself a risk factor for ending up sensitised exclusively to Can f 5.

Allergy testing in India: what it costs, and the extract problem nobody mentions

Testing in India costs between about ₹1,210 for a single specific IgE and Rs 17,900 for a broad panel, which is real money in most households, and there is a documented quality problem with the locally manufactured skin-prick extracts that is worth raising with your doctor before you pay for a skin test.

A Bangalore home-collection laboratory lists a Pet and Animal Dander Allergy panel on the ImmunoCAP platform at Rs 4,100 for three parameters, a Dust Allergy panel at Rs 3,900 for five, an Infant Allergy panel at Rs 5,200 for seven, an Asthma and Rhinitis panel at Rs 11,500 for nineteen, a Child Allergy panel at Rs 12,900 for nineteen and a Comprehensive Allergy panel at Rs 17,900 for twenty-nine. A national laboratory chain lists single-allergen specific IgE tests in Bengaluru at Rs 1,210 each and a paediatric wheeze and rhinitis panel at Rs 10,780 for nineteen parameters, against Rs 14,300 for the adult version.

Read those two lists together and the targeted test costs roughly a third of the shotgun panel, a difference of nearly nine thousand rupees. That is not only a saving. A 29-parameter panel will find positives to things your child never meets, and every one of them is noise a worried parent then has to interpret.

That finding does not mean skin testing in India is worthless. It means a negative skin prick to dust mite on an unstandardised extract is weak evidence, and that is exactly the result that gets used to convict the pet by elimination. Ask about it.

1. Ask which extract the clinic uses and whether it is imported and standardised, before booking a skin prick test.
2. Ask for a panel chosen for your city and your home rather than the largest one on the price list.
3. Ask whether the laboratory can test individual components, not just whole dog or cat extract, if the question is whether to keep a dog.
4. Ask what a negative result would change, and what a positive result would change, before you pay for either.
5. Ask for the result to be read against a written symptom diary rather than on its own.

If the allergy is real and you want to keep the animal

Reduce exposure where the child sleeps first, wash the animal twice a week, and be honest with yourself about what each measure is worth, because the guideline position is that avoidance lowers allergen levels more reliably than it lowers symptoms.

That last point is the one most pages skip. A national immunotherapy guideline states plainly that although avoidance strategies may reduce indoor allergen concentrations, they have limited effects on symptom relief. Everything below is still worth doing. None of it is a guaranteed fix, and a family that does all of it and still has a wheezing child has not failed, it has found out something useful.

Start with the bedroom, because airborne dog allergen levels are much higher in rooms where the dog is physically present. Exclude the animal from the allergic child's bedroom completely and keep it off upholstered furniture, which harbours a large amount of allergen, and wash hands immediately after handling the animal.

Washing works, and the published interval is specific. Washing a dog cut recoverable Can f 1 from hair clippings by 84 percent, from 73 to 12 micrograms per gram, and from dander samples by 86 percent, from 347 to 50. But the benefit was gone by the third day: levels on days 3 to 7 after the wash were no different from baseline. Airborne Can f 1 in the five homes measured fell by 41 percent (95% CI 13 to 60) on days 1 to 4 and 61 percent (95% CI 2 to 84) on days 5 to 7. The authors' conclusion is that the dog needs to be washed at least twice a week to maintain the reduction.

Twice a week is a lot of baths by Indian grooming norms, and in a humid climate a dog that is never dried properly develops its own skin and ear problems. Work out the bathing and drying routine with your vet, and read our guides to dog grooming at home in India and cat grooming at home in India before you raise the frequency. Those pages own coat care. This one only owns the allergen arithmetic.

The HEPA question, where two good sources disagree

A 2020 review concludes that reduction of cat allergen in indoor air with air filtration systems and portable devices has been demonstrated in the majority of studies, and that early and late asthmatic responses were significantly reduced using portable HEPA air cleaners in an environmental exposure chamber. A 2003 study measured something different and harder, namely what a person actually breathes in, using nasal air samplers in five homes with cats. Inhaled Fel d 1 fell significantly with the cleaner running and the cat in the room, but the authors concluded that air filtration units produce a much smaller reduction in inhaled cat allergen than earlier studies using standard air samplers had suggested, and that cat removal remains the best advice for a cat-allergic patient who has symptoms on exposure.

Both are published and neither has been retracted. An air cleaner measured in a sealed chamber performs better than an air cleaner measured against what a human nose takes in at home. Buy one if you can afford it, run it in the room the animal uses most and in the child's bedroom, and do not treat it as the answer on its own.

1. Exclude the animal from the bedroom and shut the door, starting tonight, because airborne allergen is much higher in rooms the animal is physically in.
2. Lift rugs and soft furnishings from the rooms the child uses most, and wash bedding at high temperature with detergent.
3. Switch from sweeping and dry dusting to a damp cloth and a mop, and let the allergic person skip the cleaning or wear a mask during it.
4. Wash the dog twice a week, which is the interval the measurement supports, after checking with a vet that the coat and ears will tolerate it.
5. Run a HEPA filter in the bedroom and in the room the animal spends most time in, if the budget allows.
6. Treat the mites at the same time, because in a humid Indian home they are the likelier culprit and the two jobs overlap.

Humidity is where the Indian version of this job differs most from the foreign advice. Our guide to monsoon care for dogs in India covers the damp-season routine, and a flat that stays shut and humid for four months is a flat where mite numbers climb while you are busy blaming the dog.

What a doctor can do, and where immunotherapy actually stands

A doctor can treat the symptoms, confirm what is driving them, and consider allergen immunotherapy, which is the only treatment that targets the underlying mechanism. For cat and dog allergen specifically, the guidelines and the specialist reviews do not agree on how well it works.

One national guideline states that allergen immunotherapy has been confirmed to be effective in treating allergic rhinitis triggered by pollen, house dust mite, animal dander and mould, that it is indicated where moderate to severe symptoms affect daily life or sleep despite drug treatment, that it can prevent progression to asthma and reduce sensitisation to new allergens, and that clinical effects are retained after at least three years of treatment.

A 2024 review written specifically about pet immunotherapy is far more cautious. It records that a paediatric position paper found limited high-quality evidence supporting immunotherapy for furry animals in children with insufficient cost-effectiveness data, that evidence for cat allergy is similarly limited, and that data for its effectiveness in dog allergy is notably absent, which the authors attribute to the lack of standardised extracts and the variability in sensitisation profiles. In real-life Spanish studies using high-dose subcutaneous extracts, improvement with cat extract was significantly better than with dog extract.

Those two positions are both current and we are publishing both. The reconciliation is probably that the guideline is speaking about animal dander as a category while the review is speaking about dog extract in particular, where standardisation is worst. If an allergist proposes immunotherapy for a dog allergy, that is the question to ask: which extract, standardised by whom, and what is the published evidence for this product rather than for the class.

Two promising approaches aimed at the cat allergen are worth knowing about so you can recognise the marketing when it reaches India. Monoclonal antibodies against Fel d 1 and a cat food containing anti-Fel d 1 antibodies from egg both reduce the active allergen, but their benefit applies only to the cat you own and in contact with you, and does not extend to other cats the person meets or to passive exposure carried on clothing and hair.

When rehoming genuinely is the right answer, and how to do it responsibly

Rehome the animal when a confirmed allergy is causing poorly controlled asthma or disease that does not respond to treatment and management, and when a doctor who has examined the child says so. That situation is real and this page will not pretend otherwise.

The honest version of the evidence includes a sentence most pet-friendly pages leave out. Writing after measuring how little an air cleaner changed what people actually inhaled, a Manchester research group concluded that cat removal remains the best advice to cat-allergic patients who experience symptoms upon exposure. Some people with severe allergies and asthma are discouraged from owning pets, even though most people can manage their symptoms and keep the animal.

Where an Indian allergist and the veterinary literature disagree

The highest-placed Indian page on this question takes the firmer line. A New Delhi paediatric pulmonologist and allergist writes that for homes with children who have allergies, the best option is to find the pet a new home, while adding that pet allergens may stay in the home for months after the animal has gone and that removal can be emotionally distressing. The veterinary handout quoted above takes the opposite default, that most people are able to keep their pets while managing their allergies, and treats rehoming as the step after prevention and treatment have been tried and have not been enough.

Both positions are defensible and we are publishing both. An allergist sees the children for whom management failed; a veterinary clinic sees the families for whom it worked. The practical reconciliation is that the order matters more than the verdict. Confirm the diagnosis, try the management for a defined period with the symptoms written down, and then let the doctor who has examined your child decide on the evidence of what actually happened in your home.

It also happens more often than families admit. In the Swedish national registry, among children who developed asthma before the age of one, the proportion of dogs that were moved to a different setting was significantly larger than among children who did not (P=.004). Allergy specialists writing about pet immunotherapy describe their whole research aim as preventing the distressing necessity of forced removals.

If it comes to that, the order of the steps decides whether the animal lands well.

1. Confirm the diagnosis properly first, with a test result, a symptom diary and a doctor's opinion, so you are not giving away an animal that was never the cause.
2. Try bedroom exclusion, twice-weekly washing and mite control for a defined period, and write down whether symptoms change, before deciding.
3. Ask family and friends about placement options before contacting a shelter, because a known home is the best outcome for an adult animal.
4. Approach a reputable rescue with full honesty about the animal's age, temperament, health and vaccination record, and expect a home check.
5. Hand over the vaccination card, the microchip number and the deworming record, and pay the sterilisation cost if the animal is not yet sterilised.
6. Never abandon an animal on the street. A house pet has no territory, no pack and no road sense, and abandonment is an offence under Indian animal welfare law.

Our guides to adopting a dog in India and adopting a cat in India set out how reputable Indian rescues run their intake and handover, which is the process you will be on the other side of. Having an allergy to one species raises the risk of allergy to another but does not guarantee it, so do not assume the next animal is ruled out.

What to take to the appointment

Take a two-week written record of symptoms and where the child was when they happened, because that record is what turns a test result into a diagnosis and it is the one thing the clinic cannot produce for you.

A specific IgE result arrives as a number on a page. What makes it mean something is the correlation between symptoms and exposure to that allergen. You are the only person who can supply the exposure half.

1. Log the symptom, the date, the time and the room, twice a day for two weeks. Sneezing, a blocked or runny nose, itchy or watery eyes, cough, wheeze, chest tightness and skin rash are the ones that count.
2. Record the away-from-home test. Note what happens on a night at a grandparent's house with no animal, and what happens on the drive back. A child who is clear for three days away and blocked within an hour of returning is telling you something a panel cannot.
3. Note the season. A pattern that tracks the monsoon or the weeks after it points at mites and mould. A pattern that is flat all year and worse in one room points somewhere else.
4. List the competing exposures honestly: agarbatti, mosquito coils and vaporisers, the mattress age, whether there are rugs, whether the flat gets damp, and whether anyone smokes.
5. Bring the family history. Allergic rhinitis or eczema in either parent is the strongest single predictor in the Indian national survey.

One last framing worth carrying into the room. Almost a quarter of Indian adolescents report allergic rhinitis, the strongest predictor of it is a parent with the same condition, and house dust mite outranks everything else in most Indian skin-prick series Dey D, Mondal P, Laha A, Sarkar T. The pet is the most visible thing in the house and the easiest to remove. That is not the same as being the cause.