The Allergy Epidemic

[ShadowHM]

Hi

The increasing number of allergic people has puzzled me for some time, and researchers have been just as mystified.

I only became aware of this epidemic when I started having children. In 'my day' the only allergies we knew about were to bee stings and poison ivy (and that only because there were a couple of mysteriously 'immune to poison ivy' kids).

But soon after enrolling my first-born in a nursery school I was alarmed and shaken to discover that there were children who could go into anaphylactic shock from peanut butter - that staple of my childhood's lunchbox food. It became clear that there was much more to it than that. Eggs and milk could do the same. I can still recall the visceral horror I felt as I watched one woman I knew slather her child with cortisone cream after each outbreak of hives from touching egg products. She had not removed them from her home, and blithely said that her doctor had told her that he could use it for twenty years before ill effects showed up. I had to bite my tongue hard to not ask how long she expected that child to live. :(

The numbers just keep growing. Over the twenty years since I have been observing this, more and more chidren in my sons' schools have allergies. According to an article in Macleans magazine:

Almost 50 per cent of infants today suffer from some form of eczema, and the prevalence of hay fever stands at between 30 and 40 per cent of the population -- a two- to threefold increase in the last few decades.

The good news is that there are researchers who are just as alarmed and puzzled by this as I am, and that government agencies of all kinds are equally concerned. A new study here in Canada has just been announced that may (eventually) shed more light on the topic.

AllerGen has also coralled an impressive pack of immunologists, epidemiologists, asthma specialists, geneticists and others to collect data from what its researchers are calling the "birth cohort" -- a group of 10,000 families that they hope will be involved in the largest study of its kind in the world. The goal is to observe pregnant women soon after they conceive and then follow their children for as long as possible, perhaps into adulthood, if funding allows. They can then examine as many aspects of the families' environments as possible to determine why, and in what circumstances, people may develop allergies.

I thought I would share this article and the information given about the current hypotheses about the phenomenon, as I expect that many of the Lurkers will have the same observations and likely a more intimate comprehension of the problems it causes than I do.

Article in Macleans Magazine

Shadow, who has blessedly allergy-free children