Posted on 11/29/2005 9:32:46 PM PST by neverdem
Newhouse News Service
Multiple-choice question: Why are more American kids allergic to foods, particularly peanuts?
A) Their immune systems are confused by increasingly clean homes.
B) Nervous parents wait too long to feed their children peanuts.
C) We roast peanuts rather than boil them.
D) Maybe one of the above, and/or something else.
Unfortunately, the answer is "D."
One study estimates American children's rate of allergy to peanuts and tree nuts (like walnuts and pecans) — about 1 percent of those under age 18 — has doubled in recent years. No one can say why.
But whatever biological mysteries are at work, U.S. children are more likely to be allergic to peanuts than kids in China, in Israel and in many underdeveloped nations, experts say.
"It's a moving target," said Dr. Robert Wood, a pediatric immunology professor at Johns Hopkins University. "The numbers may be different by the time the next study gets done."
Deaths from allergic reactions to food are not officially counted, but studies suggest 150-200 fatalities a year, experts say. Case studies of 32 food-allergy deaths during 1994-99 showed that most victims died of reactions to nuts, most had asthma, and 13 were under 18 years old.
Though rare, deaths from food allergies can occur with shocking caprice.
New law on allergies
On Jan. 1, a new federal law goes into effect requiring food manufacturers to use simple language — milk instead of "caseinates," egg instead of "albumin" — in food products' ingredients lists. The law will apply to peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, fish, wheat, soybeans and crustaceans (such as shrimp and crabs). Proteins in these foods cause about 90 percent of allergic reactions. Studies of peanut, tree-nut, fish and shellfish allergies suggest 11.4 million Americans, or about 4 percent of the population, have food allergies, according to the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network. Ten years ago, scientists believed less than 1 percent of the population was affected.
In 2003, about 1,800 children under 18 were hospitalized due to food allergies, according to a federal estimate. That number had increased only slightly during the preceding decade, but researchers say many allergic episodes go uncounted when hospitals misclassify them.
"The data are not clear enough to say what the true rate of increase has been, but we would be very comfortable saying the rate of food allergy has truly increased," said Wood.
The only treatment for a severe allergic reaction is a shot of epinephrine, a hormone that relaxes the airways of someone struggling with a life-threatening allergic response.
On Jan. 1, a new federal law goes into effect requiring food manufacturers to use simple language — milk instead of "caseinates," egg instead of "albumin" — in food products' ingredients lists. The law will apply to peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, fish, wheat, soybeans and crustaceans (such as shrimp and crabs). Proteins in these foods cause about 90 percent of allergic reactions.
Meanwhile, some advocates are pushing for federal guidelines for schools to create emergency action plans for allergic students.
In well-prepared schools, administrators have assembled teachers, parents, a school nurse and others to discuss how to handle emergencies and how to make a school safe, said Anne Munoz-Furlong, founder of the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, a group advocating more protections. "Nut-free" zones are becoming more common on school lunch tables.
Even highly sensitive peanut-allergic children are unlikely to experience a severe reaction from casual external contact with peanut butter, research has shown. Soap and water effectively remove the allergen from surfaces such as tabletops, while disposable wipes work well with hands.
But reactions do occur, most often when a child unknowingly eats something containing an allergen. Serious problems result when a school's files contain nothing from a child's doctor about a condition, what symptoms to look for and how and when to give medication.
"A child eats something, thinks it was safe, but they have a reaction," Munoz-Furlong said. "They're sent to the office, the office staff calls the parents. Or the child has asthma, and they give her an inhaler. The reaction gets completely out of control, and when you bring epinephrine into the picture, it's too late."
An allergic reaction occurs when the body mistakenly identifies something as an invader and activates a portion of the immune system. People with hay fever, for example, overreact to the inhalation of pollen. The same process occurs in food allergies, with protein acting as the trigger.
In someone allergic to peanuts, for example, the body senses a specific protein has attached to cells in the body. To "protect" the cells, it sends out special antibodies called immunoglobulin E, or IgE. When IgE reaches the cells, it causes them to release histamines and other chemicals that may cause itching, nausea or restricted breathing.
In trying to explain the increase in allergies, many scientists have embraced the "hygiene hypothesis." It holds that some people's immune systems have gone out of whack because America's increasing cleanliness has changed the behavior of IgE.
The central role of IgE is to help fight infections. But as America has become more sanitary, and as antibiotics have cut down on infections, IgE has less work to do, making it restless and prone to attack new things.
"The more [IgE] is left 'unbusy' because we're not being exposed to germs early in life, the more it could direct its attention toward allergies," said Wood.
Some data support this idea. Allergy rates are lower in many underdeveloped nations, perhaps because the immune systems of those who live there are constantly exercised.
But the hygiene hypothesis, which would apply to all kinds of allergies, doesn't explain everything.
"It's not clear that it's the whole story," said Dr. Marshall Plaut, chief of allergic mechanisms at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Doctors have successfully "desensitized" patients with allergies like hay fever by injecting them with small but increasing doses of pollen. Such "immunotherapy" often causes severe reactions when tried against food allergies — an effect scientists are trying to understand and avert.
Mindful of the hygiene hypothesis, researchers also are studying whether exposing children earlier in life to peanuts and other potential allergens may properly prepare their immune systems.
Peanut allergy rates in Israel are low compared with the United States, and some suspect that's because many Israeli children eat peanut snacks earlier and more often than American children do.
"It could be the hygiene hypothesis," Munoz-Furlong said. "It could be the way peanuts are processed. In China they boil them, and we roast them. Or, it could be how they introduce it; in this country, we wait until the third birthday. In Israel, it's typically before the first birthday."
This year I took the flu shot for the first time in my life. I never felt the need for it before. I developed some bad Asthma problems over the summer from mold exposure and it set off the problems. I've had a life long sinus allergy history. I took allergy shots as a kid. Had I been diagnosed early enough as a kid and gotten the shots I may have not be on disability now. The allergies over time severly damaged my sensory interpitation system mainly the Inner Ear portion. Allergies in the 50's & 60's were not that well understood though. By the time I started the allergy shots in the early 70's the damage was already done.
My wife is in worse health than me due to quadriplegia. She does not take a flu shot and the doctor doesn't push it. She is likely a Polio Relapse Syndrome patient with a diagnoses of Transverse Myelitis. The Polio probability showed up in her rehab process when they did limb measurements on her.
Was it a mild undetected case of Polio or the vaccine she's she took? Our generation got two differing doses of it one an injection the other was the sugar cube. No doubt the Polio vaccine save many lives. Reality also is though many lives were harmed as well from them.
I'm also a nurse and think it's related to gm soy exposure and cross sensitivity. I don't think they'd want to admit that gm soy is responsible though.
One of our children used to get hives whenever she ate Chef Boy-R-D products or other tomato w/preservatives products such as Ragu spaghetti sauce. We avoided all such items for years. Occasionally, daughter would eat ravioli at lunch at school, and she would break out again. She appears to have outgrown the allergy. Our oldest boy is allergic to ibuprofin. That was a tough one to figure out because the allergy progressed from minor hives to VERY severe hives, and the last time he had Motrin, his throat began to swell shut. We had been to the doctor about the hives, but the doctor we saw thought it was possibly a seasonal allergy. It took two more doses of Motrin for us to pin it down. (over about a six month period) The last time was very scary. When we returned to our pediatric practice, we had the pediatrician document it, and she sent us to an allergist. The allergist has seen a total of 6 patients with a similar allergy. I mentioned this to another parent one day, and oddly, one of her daughters has the exact same allergy. Both of our children were born 5 weeks prematurely.
The same son used to have a mild allergy to milk. He seems to have outgrown it. Our second son has developed asthma that occurs a few weeks into baseball season. He is a catcher, and the molds/pollens in the clay turn his eyes red and make him wheeze. He never had any allergies until this past baseball season.
Hopefully researchers will find what has caused this profound increase in life threatening allergic reactions, but until headway can be made scientifically, precautions (the more accurate product labeling, removing allergens from vulnerable populations--schools), must be taken.
Easy, our pedoitrician went nuts that we introduced our baby daughter to meat at 6 months and that well before that she was eating mashed potatoes and sour cream, etc. My wife is from Russia, this is normal and the kids don't have the allergies. He wanted us to keep her on chemical based baby food diets till she was well past one. She's two now and doesn't have any allergies except to chocolate.
Or it could be from the chemically laden diets we feed ourselves. Might explain why we are the fatest, most obese society in human history too.
Just as vaccinating dogs against corona, bordatella, etc., is wasteful and damaging to the immune system, vaccinating a newborn infant against HEP-B is insane unless the environment this infant will live in is putting it at risk of Hepatitis B... and vaccinating anyone while being breast fed interferes with natural immunity the child or animal receives from the mothers' milk.
I work for a MD and it never fails than a baby has a series of vaccinations and is back within days with fever, diarrhea and/or runny nose/ear aches.
People are too quick to think a vaccine is a cure all and don't look at the benefits of having a healthy immune system as the first line of defence. There is actually a strain of cancer that is traced back to the polio vaccine given in the early 60's. The carrier this vaccine was grown on is showing up in numerous cancer cells.
From the CDC website:
Simian virus 40, or SV40, was discovered in 1960. It occurs naturally in some species of monkeys, though it does not typically cause symptoms or illness except in cases where the animal has chronic problems with its immune system (Shah and Nathanson, 1976). In those cases, the animals develop lesions associated with SV40 in their kidneys and brains (Newman et al., 1998).
SV40 is not related to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS in humans, or to simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), the virus that causes an AIDS-like disease in some monkey species.
Why is there so much interest in SV40?
Soon after its discovery in 1960, SV40 was identified in polio vaccine. It was found in the injected form of the vaccine (IPV), not the kind given by mouth (OPV). At that time, rhesus monkey kidney cells, which contain SV40 if the animal is infected, were used in preparing viral vaccines.
Because SV40 was not discovered until 1960, no one was aware that polio vaccine made in the 1950s could be contaminated. In 1961, the virus was found to cause tumors in rodents (Eddy et al., 1961). That same year, the federal government required that new stocks of polio vaccine be free of SV40.
However, existing polio vaccine stocks were not recalled and were used until 1963. When SV40 was discovered, researchers did not know if the virus could negatively affect people's health. Many viruses that harm animals have no effect on people because of the biological differences between animals and humans.
Interest in SV40 has increased in the last several years because the virus was found in certain forms of cancer in humans, for instance mesotheliomas (rare tumors located in the lungs), brain, and bone tumors (Carbone et al., 1994; Jasani et al., 2001). More recently, SV40 has also been found to be associated with some types of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (Shivapurkar et al., 2002; Vilchez et al., 2002).
It's actually pretty interesting.
I would go for e. - we treat pregnant women like they are made of glass.
My friend is currently pregnant and you should see the list of things she "can't" have: fish, alcohol, caffeine, soda (even decaf), soft cheeses, luncheon meat, and more. It's insane. Yet when my mom was pregnant they could have all these things (including alochol in moderation) and we're far healthier than today's kids.
I didn't have allergies when I was little, and now I have severe allergies. Lots of allergies take lots of exposure before you become sensitive to them.
I used to live in Texas, and then moved to California. The first year I was in California was great. I barely had any allergy reactions. After a year, I started going crazy again. It just took awhile before I developed my sensitivities.
Hope you daughter doesn't develop any allergies. They suck.
They still do allergy shots, and there are some other treatments.
Wow that was fun, 3 in the right arm, 2 in the left. Tried to schedule the shots 3 days prior to a ballgame or I couldn't play.
Thanks for the info. Polio was one wicked killer virus. Overall the vaccine program for it was a success and likely saved many lives. Improved technology for sanitation and water purification helped end the epidemic as well. I would say one had about as much to do with it as the other.
My brother died of cancer last year, and I wonder why he died. He died of skin cancer, and he is one of the few people in the world that died from it. He was only 48, and he had the cancer since he was in his early 20's. It finally spread to his brain and was inoperable.
I keep on thinking there was something in his immune system that made the cancer worse. If there was something in his immune system, was it genetic. Do his kids have to worry about cancer? I worry about his daughter. She is a redhead (like her dad), and breast cancer runs on her mom's side.
The thing is that he was always the healthiest of the kids in my family. He rarely got sick, and didn't have problems with allergies. I never remember him having flu, colds, throwing up, etc. I know he had some when he was little, but that was it. He was also very athletic.
I was always the sickly one, and I'm not athletic, and I should outlive my brother by a long shot. I don't have skin cancer, so I'm already ahead of him in that respect. I'm 6 years younger, so we'll see how much longer I live.
Strange how our bodies work.
You know, I used to have no allergies to pine pollen, never really even noticed it. Then at 19 it hit me like a ton of bricks and did so for about 4 years. After that each year it got less and less and now 15 years later I barely notice it again.
Researchers discovered that msg resulted in fatter rats and use it to fatten them up. Look at how many packaged foods have msg under it's many, varied names to disguise it. Also, cattle are fed corn to fatten them, how many products use high-fructose corn syrup? Reading labels is very educational. It's amazing what products contain sugar that one would never suspect. It's no surprise so many people are obese and have trouble losing weight.
No more than Big Sugar would admit to being at least partially resposible for Type II diabetes.
Fat, obese, lazy, self-centered, selfish, boring, ugly, morally corrupt.
Maybe we should all develop allergies to mankind and rid the planet of the ultimate (human) virus.
The point is that the diseases that are innoculated against are more deadly than the allergies.
I actually believe it has a lot more to do with the way the vaccines are manufactured and administered than anything -- themeriosol for instance (mercury base) is believed to be a reason for a sharp increase in autism.
There is not now, nor has there ever been a link between thimerosal and autism, except in the fevered imagination of the trial attorneys.
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