Pollen

The cold and gloomy stairway with its grit-covered steps was forbidding, but the man in the suit making his way to the roof was undeterred. A public-health nemesis was on the loose, and Donald J. Dvorin was on the trail of the elusive evidence. Dvorin is a full-time allergist, but he's also a part-time, volunteer detective. Consulting a homely rooftop machine atop his Center City office building, he's the one who figures out the region's daily pollen counts. And in recent years, they have taken on a fresh importance.

This summer's near-record rainfall may serve as an alert for hay fever victims, some allergy experts say. Paul Reber, retired horticulture agent at the Penn State Cooperative Extension Service in Montgomery County, said the plants that affected hay fever would certainly be much healthier this year, considering the abundance of rain. "We've had perfect growing conditions this summer, which are sure to multiply the number of pollen-producing flowers," he said. Agronomy Extension agent Timothy Fritz said, however, that more rain this summer might actually help those with allergies.

Michelle Robertson assumed it was a nasty cold that kept showing up every year around this time. She had days when she would sneeze her head off. She had trouble driving. She missed time from her job as a medical assistant at a doctor's office, and when she did show up, the patients would look at her red, swollen eyes and give her friendly advice: See a doctor. She did. "I just couldn't take it anymore," said Robertson, 25, who lives in Yardley. She learned that, as with about 20 percent of the population, she was allergic to pollen.

Dr. Allan Koff doesn't mow his own lawn anymore. Like many of his patients, he's allergic to the pollen that bursts from the trees around Philly every spring. "First it's the oak, then sycamore," he says, "and then comes dogwood - and the rest are close behind. " "That's how I got out of mowing the lawn," adds Koff, an internist with the Albert Einstein Health Care Network in the Northeast. Right now the long-needled pine is dumping yellow pollen onto windshields and sidewalks across the city.

Bumblebees wallowing salaciously in the saffron powder of fertility may be drunk with the joy of springtime flora, but pollen is making a lot of humans feel like hell. Mud-filled sinuses. Poison-ivy eyes. Tissue abrasions of the nose. Squall- warning sneezes that alarm the neighbors. Experts say that this is a faint variation of the misery to come in late summer when ragweed blows through town, afflicting two-thirds of allergy sufferers. Information like this is as useless as a vial of expired antihistamines to anyone who is allergic to tree and grass pollen.

He said his name was Luigi Somma. He carried a Pennsylvania driver's license that indicated he lived in the 1000 block of Surrey Road in the Far Northeast. The license and the address were legitimate. Luigi Somma was not. The name, federal authorities say, was one of several aliases used by William Pollen, once a highly regarded orthopedic surgeon who became a million-dollar tax deadbeat and led investigators on an exotic four-year chase before his arrest in August in the parking lot of a convenience store a few miles from his North Jersey home.

William Pollen, the globe-hopping doctor who used fake identities and phony passports to travel to Europe and South America during four years of dodging IRS investigators and a 1986 income tax evasion indictment, pleaded guilty yesterday to four of the eight counts in that indictment. Pollen, who appeared in U.S. District Court in Camden dressed in a wrinkled gray business suit, white shirt and flowered tie, hardly looked the part of the James Bond-like character a federal judge once compared him to. The silver-haired, 68-year-old former orthopedic surgeon from North Jersey has been in custody since his arrest in August.

Don't look now - but they're baaaaaack! Yes, the allergy season is upon us, and those pesky pollens that make life so trying for the allergy-sensitive are out in force - unleashed by the unseasonably warm weather last week and the increasing hours of daylight. Ah, the perils of pollen! But with something like 20 percent of the people in the country affected by seasonal allergies, the problem is nothing to sneeze at. It's happening a little earlier than last year, but there's no question that pollen panic has already set in in the area, according to David Lang, director of allergy-immunology at Hahnemann University Hospital.

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Paul DiLorenzo has lived with it for 26 years, and this, he says, is as bad as it gets. "It's one of the worst years I remember," said DiLorenzo, 61, retired Philadelphia police officer and active hay-fever sufferer. He is familiar with the drill - sneezing, sore throat, sneezing, itching eyes, sneezing, congestion, more sneezing - but this year he has added something new. "The sneezing's actually made my chest sore," he said. Since Monday, experts say, the air has been stuffed with tree and grass pollen and mold spores, in part due to nature's great annual love frenzy.