Posted on 11/01/2004 8:10:16 AM PST by Willie Green
It started at birth with head-to-toe eczema. Then Noah Smith began throwing up his baby formula and losing weight. His parents knew something was really wrong about a year ago when he stopped eating altogether.
At first doctors thought that Noah, 2, of Irwin, Westmoreland County, had gastroesophageal reflux disease, or chronic heartburn.
But a closer look inside his digestive system revealed that Noah suffers from a new, allergy-linked disorder that Pittsburgh doctors have started to diagnose at alarming rates in the past several years.
The disease is called eosinophilic (pronounced ee-OH-sin-oh-filic) esophagitis -- commonly called EE -- and it is on the rise among children in Southwestern Pennsylvania, said Dr. Susan Orenstein, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh in Oakland.
Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center estimate that EE now strikes about 22,000 children in the United States every year, although the cases aren't spread uniformly through the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
Now that's a disease that hurts just to pronounce it!
Is this one of the allergies curable with hepatitis A infection?
What?
What?
Living with dogs, cats, horses, etc. as a child apparently prevented allergies for me. Or was it field dissections of coyotes? Or maybe eating carrots straight out of the ground? It could have been catching snakes barehanded and subsequently eating a peanut butter sandwich. Maybe it was those "candies" my cousin made me eat when I was 4.
Although abolition of public slit trenches has probably aided in general sanitation and control of some infectious diseases this action may well have led us into a plague of allergies and asthma.
Our impoverished, illiterate and primitive hillbilly Great Great Grandparents may well have been more advanced than we are regarding public health needs.
I doubt it.
But with thousands of more serious FReepers, some with medical backgrounds, some with sick babies or grand-babies, nieces, nephews, etc. I figure it's good to spread the word. A news article doesn't provide all the medical info, of course. But it can get people pointed in the right direction, and hopefully a little toddler can get proper treatment more quickly. And if the Internet wisecrackers bump the thread to the top, that's okay too. More people see the info, the better IMHO.
to give an idea of how bad it is, eosinophilic esophagitis drives an SUV.
Nexium works wonders with kind of thing.
Now this really frustrated me. On the farm they were exposed to a couple of dozen cats, dogs, sheep, goats, chickens, geese, ducks, straw, hay, grain, wood smoke, cigarette smoke and on and on. They grazed in the veggie garden and played in their sunflower and corn playhouse. At home they were exposed to nothing. Within two weeks of coming home, they were sick again. It took me about two years to figure it out. I started smoking in the house and we moved outside of the city. We got two cats and a dog. They don't have allergies any more.
Yes, I've heard that mothers' breastmilk helps pass various antibodies to infants, strengthing the little one's own immune systems. But I'm certainly not a medical expert on that sort of thing.
ROTFLMAO! Now, do we call Social Services because of the second-hand smoke exposure, the rural "neglect" factor or the clean allergy-spawning city lifestyle?
It's a puzzler!
Thank you for posting this. So many children are going undiagnosed for too long.
My 6 1/2 y/o son has Eosinophilic Esophagitis, and had symptoms on the first day of his life. He threw up almost daily until age 5. He has had stomach pain all of his life. We finally got the dx in 8/04 via endoscopic biopsy (the ONLY way to diagnose this disease), and then he had patch testing to determine what foods he was allergic to as skin prick testing/scratch testing, and RAST (blood) testing is not always accurate for this type of food allergy.
It is often caused by a non-IgE mediated food allergy, and it is a delayed reaction, not like the IgE mediated anaphylaxis, runny nose, watery eyes, hives, etc that you get with other allergies. This one causes damage to your GI tract. In my son's case, it is just in his esophagus at this point. So far, we have identified 15 different foods to which he reacts (wheat, rice, corn, buckwheat, garbanzo/fava bean {an alternative flour for those allergic to normal ones}, beef, pork, fish, shrimp, green beans, peaches, garlic, broccoli and peanuts). Not your average, run-of-the-mill list of allergens, huh. Try to figure out what to feed a child who reacts to all of these foods, and the hidden ingredients in other foods. Did you realize that gelatin is made of beef or pork? It is used in lots of things, incl medicines! How about corn starch? Any food starch - try to avoid them!
We have eliminated these, leaving him with very few foods, yet he is still reacting. He has to go through another endoscopy tomorrow morning. Scoping is something he will go through on a regular basis for years to come. If he still has a large # of eosinophils, he has to go on a feeding tube, which we are expecting.
This little boy is a sweet, loving, intelligent child. There is nothing he ever did or anyone ever did to cause this to him. It is something that is inherited. It was only discovered in 1937, and no one knew much about it until the late 1990's. Many Drs aren't familiar enough about it even today, so many kids continue to go undiagnosed. So, you can't say it was caused by a hygiene issue. My mother was born in 1938, and she was bedridden throughout her entire childhood with very similar symptoms, as well as chronic asthma. She couldn't even attend school until high school. She still has problems, but nothing like when she was young. To say it is a hygiene issue is irresponsible. It has nothing to do with how hygienic or unhygienic you are.
In the olden days, children died of diarrhea. It was one of the most common if not THE most common cause of death in children. My personal opinion is that it's been around for a long time, but in days of old, most of these children wouldn't have lived through childhood. Thank goodness for progress and good research.
If anyone honestly wants to learn more about this, here are a few good places to do some reading:
First, this is one of the best articles I have come across, and it gives a good account of what we go through trying to find a reason for our children's GI problems, not to mention trying to get proper treatment. It is by one of the leaders in eosinophilic research.
The Mother of All Food Allergies, by Dr. Philip E. Putnam, MD, From the 7/03 edition of The Journal of Pediatrics.
http://www2.us.elsevierhealth.com/scripts/om.dll/serve?action=searchDB&searchDBfor=art&artType=fullfree&id=as0022347603002737
The 2nd is a wonderful organization that is trying to promote education and research for eosinophilic disease:
http://apfed.org/egid.htm
You could also look up "Eosinophilic" on either Cincinnati Children's Hospital's or Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's websites. They have some information on symptoms and treatment.
Hmmm...
Thanks for the ping. I had head to toe exzema and extreme food allergies for the first 18 months of my life, and almost died from malnutrition. Along with that I had asthma. I still have many food allergies. I don't know if it was eosinophilic esophagitis, but it was severe allergies to most nutritious food, including eggs and milk.
Somehow, I survived. My children have only mild allergies.
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