My Allergy Kid

I can’t find the link to the actual site where I found this article, but I had saved the article itself. I think it’s important enough for everyone to read, so I’ll post the entire article:

By Will Dunham
Fri May 2, 9:04 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A form of immunotherapy that could get rid of a person’s allergy to peanuts is likely within five years, even as the condition appears to grow more and more common, a U.S. expert said on Thursday.

Peanut allergy often appears in the first three years of life, with the allergic reaction to eating peanuts ranging from a minor irritation all the way to a life-threatening, whole-body allergic response called anaphylaxis.

Many children grow out of other food allergies such as milk or eggs, but only about 20 percent lose their peanut allergy.

Dr. Wesley Burks, a food allergy expert at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, wrote in the Lancet medical journal that a solution appears to be on the horizon.

“I think there’s some type of immunotherapy that will be available in five years. And the reason I say that is that there are multiple types of studies that are ongoing now,” Burks said in a telephone interview.

Ideally, such a therapy would change a person’s immune response to peanuts from an allergic one to a nonallergic one, Burks said.

He said one possible approach is using engineered peanut proteins as immunotherapy. Other approaches are showing promise, he said, including the use of Chinese herbal medicine in animal research.

Genetic engineering may also produce an allergen-free peanut, Burks said.

But he said that because several peanut proteins are involved in the allergic response, the process of altering enough of the peanut allergens to make a modified peanut that is less likely to cause an allergic reaction would probably render the new peanut no longer a peanut.

“You could end up with a soybean,” Burks said.

He said peanut allergy affects about 1 percent of children under age of 5, and that in the past 15 years more children have been diagnosed with the condition.

He cited research showing the condition becoming more common — doubling among young children from 0.4 percent in 1997 to 0.8 percent in 2002 in one U.S. study

It is unclear why it is becoming more common, he said. One theory he cited was the “hygiene hypothesis,” which holds that too little exposure to infectious agents in early childhood can raise one’s susceptibility to allergic reactions.

Burks said other researchers have suggested that if a pregnant woman eat peanuts, her baby has a higher risk of becoming allergic.

Symptoms of peanut allergy includes skin reactions such as hives, itching around the mouth and throat, diarrhea, stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, wheezing and, in severe cases, anaphylaxis — a medical emergency.
(Editing by Maggie Fox and Xavier Briand)

Articles like this one make my heart ache and scare me to death at the same time. This is one of the reasons I want to spread the word on food allergies. Parents, children, friends, anyone who doesn’t know about food allergies should. Taunting acts such as the ones in that article can be fatal and must be prevented. It saddens me to think that kids have to go through things like this. In my opinion, this type of taunting is far worse than name calling, pushing, etc. This type of ridicule and badgering can cause an element of fear in the child that is unnecessary. No child should be threatened or teased about something so serious as a health condition- especially one that could kill them.

I hope that for Mason’s sake, I can spread the word so his friends and family understand how serious the issue is and how it is no joking matter. I would be doing my son a disservice to sit idly by and not take action. I encourage all parents of children with food allergies to step up and help spread the word… let’s do it for our children, so that their world can be a little less scary.

Food allergies are very different from a food intolerance. The common misconception is that they are the same thing. I can’t put it into words better than the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), so this information comes straight from them.

The difference between an allergy and an intolerance is how the body handles the offending food. In a true food allergy, the body’s immune system recognizes a reaction-provoking substance, or allergen, in the food–usually a protein–as foreign and produces antibodies to halt the “invasion.” As the battle rages, symptoms appear throughout the body. The most common sites are the mouth (swelling of the lips), digestive tract (stomach cramps, vomiting, diarrhea), skin (hives, rashes or eczema), and the airways (wheezing or breathing problems). People with allergies must avoid the offending foods altogether.

Food intolerance is a much more common problem than allergy. Here, the problem is not with the body’s immune system, but, rather, with its metabolism. The body cannot adequately digest a portion of the offending food, usually because of some chemical deficiency. For example, persons who have difficulty digesting milk (lactose intolerance) often are deficient in the intestinal enzyme lactase, which is needed to digest milk sugar (lactose). The deficiency can cause cramps and diarrhea if milk is consumed. Estimates are that about 80 percent of African-Americans have lactose intolerance, as do many people of Mediterranean or Hispanic origin. It is quite different from the true allergic reaction some have to the proteins in milk.

(http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/wh-alrg1.html)