Eczema Drugs Linked to Cancer Risk

There is a scary warning about two common drugs used for eczema. The FDA is recommending warning labels for the skin creams Elidel® and Protpic®. They may cause cancer.

I suspect that many of you were told, as we were, that these two creams were the best treatment on the market for our children's eczema, since they were non-steroid based. We switched to these creams when we noticed some loss of pigment on some areas of the leg. "That's from the steroid cream you're using to treat the eczema," our allergist said. Two new (at the time) creams were recommended to us.

Now we find out that these creams have caused cancer in animals involved in a study. Human study results will be unknown for 10 years.

So we wait?

If you are still using either cream, I suggest speaking to your allergist or dermatologist about risks and benefits. They are not being pulled off the market and doctors seem to believe they have a place in eczema treatment.

They are not, though, the "miracle drug" I was led to believe they were...

Kids and Food Allergy Video

Share this video with your kids, grandparents, teachers, school nurses and friends. It's eye-opening.

How about the girl who sat alone in her elementary school cafeteria for 2 years at the peanut-free table?

How about the kids who talk about hurt feelings when other kids make jokes about food allergies?

What about students who feel scared at school because of food crumbs or M&M's® lying around?

Isn't it scary to hear that 18% of food allergy reactions occur at school?

We can do better than this!

How Do Families Cope with Food Allergies?

National Jewish Health® has received a $450,000 grant from the National Institute of Health to study how families cope with food allergy.

Available data suggest that half of parents with food-allergic children experience a pervasive fear for their child's safety, and a sizable subgroup restrict normal child and family activities because of food allergies. Others do not appreciate the potential severity of a food-allergy reaction and are casual about their precautions and preparations.

Check out this information on the grant.

Anyone interested in participating in this trial (open to families with children between ages 6-12) can call National Jewish Health® at 303-398-1006 for more information.

Food Allergy Conference this Week-End in Baltimore

FAAN’s Annual Food Allergy Conference Comes to Baltimore

Learn How to “Respect Every Bite” at this Daylong Educational Conference

FAIRFAX, Va. (March 17, 2010) – The Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN) is bringing together parents, physicians, dietitians, caregivers, and others for its 17th Annual Food Allergy Conferences, the first of which will be held in Baltimore and promises to give attendees new insights and strategies about food allergies and anaphylaxis.

The daylong conference on March 27 will urge everyone to “Respect Every Bite” and feature topics such as the psychosocial impact of living with food allergies, safety at school, food allergy basics, and a research update from one of the nation’s top allergists. It is the first of FAAN’s four spring conferences, which have long been known to offer a unique opportunity for individuals managing food allergies to gain a top-notch learning experience while connecting with others who share similar challenges.

This year’s conferences, to be held also in Las Vegas (April 24), Tarrytown, N.Y. (May 8), and Oak Brook, Ill. (May 22), now offer attendees more choices in the form of multiple breakout sessions from which to choose.

“We have planned a fantastic program this year that is designed to provide everyone from parents to school nurses to babysitters with the knowledge they need to avoid food allergy reactions, which can be potentially fatal,” said Julia Bradsher, CEO of FAAN. “It doesn’t matter if someone has managed food allergies for years or is newly diagnosed – everyone will gain valuable information.”

Top food allergy researcher Robert A. Wood, M.D., will be one of the featured speakers in Baltimore. Wood is a professor of pediatrics and international health and the director of pediatric allergy and immunology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The Baltimore conference will run from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. at the Sheraton Inner Harbor Hotel, 300 S. Charles St.

For more information or to register for one of FAAN’s Food Allergy Conferences, visit www.foodallergy.org or call (800) 929-4040.

The Positives of Coping With Food Allergies Guest Post

Thank you to Ashley M. Jones for submitting this post on the positive side of food allergy.

It’s not something you want your child to be born with, but when it comes to food allergies, you have no choice. You discover that they’re allergic to certain proteins in dairy products, eggs or nuts, and from then on, you become increasingly protective about them and take all possible precautions to avoid adverse reactions that could become fatal if you’re not prepared. And as your child grows up, you get them to become responsible for their health; you educate them on what they should and shouldn’t eat; and you teach them to take care of their allergies and be prepared to deal with any emergencies that may arise.

It’s natural for a child to feel out of sorts at times because of a food allergy – after all, they cannot share their friends’ food or let their guard down during a picnic. But even though a food allergy is something we don’t want, if you do have it, there are positive ways to look at it.

· Your diet is healthier: If you suffer from food allergies, you don’t eat out too much. All your food is home-cooked or carefully selected after checking the ingredients involved. This means your diet becomes healthier as you are in control of what you eat. Also, you tend to eat more fruits and vegetables as they provide you with nutrition and help boost your immune system in the long run.

· You lose weight: When you avoid eating out and stick to home-cooked food, you tend to pick foods that are light on your stomach and which contain less fat and other substances that tend to increase your weight. This makes you lose or at least maintain your weight. So you don’t have to battle obesity problems like the kids who don’t have food allergies and so don’t have to worry about what they eat.

· You take better care of your health: You may have to altogether remove certain foods from your diet because of your allergies, and this means you could be losing out nutrition. So you naturally tend to take nutritional supplements to balance this deficiency or you eat alternative foods that give you the same nutrition but don’t contain the allergens you react badly to.

· You avoid the negative aspects of dairy products: If you’re allergic to milk and other dairy products, you don’t have to worry about not being able to eat ice creams and flavored yogurt – for one, consumption of dairy has been linked to heart disease, obesity, cancer, diabetes and osteoporosis; and for another, there are tasty alternatives to dairy products, like soy. Although dairy is your main source of calcium and Vitamin D, there are supplements and other food items that act as decent substitutes.

So if you have a food allergy, don’t let it get you down; rather, try to look at the positive side of the picture and cope as best as you can.

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Ashley M. Jones, who writes on the topic of pharmacy tech certification . She welcomes your comments at her email id: ashleym.jones643@gmail.com.

Food Allergy Assistant and Technical Difficulties

The Food Allergy Assistant is caught up in "name servers", "domain registration", "DNS information", "ISP's" and many other confusing technical terms. The website is broken! I can still be found at www.foodallergyassistant.blogspot.com, but the links are not working on the blog page for now.

So, I'm learning how a DNS works and how to point my website to a name server. I should have www.foodallergyassistant.com up and running again in the next few days.

Fingers crossed...

In the meantime, check in this week through the Blogspot address.

Diagnosis and Management of Food Allergy

The public is welcome to comment on the “Guidelines of the Diagnosis and Management of Food Allergy”, as developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. These guidelines have been established to give information to healthcare providers about diagnosis and treatment of food allergies.

The bad news is that it is a 119 page document. The good news is that you have until May 6, 2010 to comment.

Who better to give that input than us?

Honestly, it is an interesting read. In the section "Management of Food-Induced Anaphylaxis", it is clearly stated that an epinephrine auto-injector should be the first-line treatment. The use of antihistamines was often given as a reason for not using epinephrine. All studies indicate that this puts the patient at significant risk of a life-threatening reaction. The guidelines also acknowledge that school aged children who do not have immediate access to epinephrine, are at an increased risk for a life-threatening event.

Take that to your uncooperative school administrator.

So, grab a cup of coffee and a few quiet moments, and take a look at the guidelines. Then, register, and offer your comments. I must admit, it feels good to be asked for an opinion about how healthcare providers handle food allergy.

Allergy Gene Identified

Researchers at CHOP (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) have identified the gene that could be responsible for eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE).

This is big news because the gene, TSLP, has already been linked to other allergic diseases, like asthma and eczema. It's just another piece of the puzzle as scientists try to understand the relationships between allergic diseases in an effort to treat and cure these common disorders.

You will need to subscribe to Nature Genetics in order to read the full article, but here is a snapshot, written in the India edition of Zee News.

Food Allergy Research Findings Presented at Conference

The AAAAI (American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology) wrapped up its annual conference last week. Food allergy was the center of several prominent studies. Here is a re-cap of some of the big ones:

Oral Immunotherapy shows Promise for Egg Allergy- Early results from this study show that egg allergic children may be able to tolerate eggs following a course of ingesting increasing amounts of egg protein. Of course this has all been done in a carefully controlled setting and should not be tried at home. More about that in the video link at the end of this post.

Milk Allergic Children Tolerate Milk heated at high temperatures. The study shows that up to 80% of milk allergic children may be able to eat baked products like cookies and cakes containing milk. Something seems to change within the milk protein when it is heated at a high temperature. Research in this area continues.

Anaphylaxis to Meat is more common than originally thought. The message is that clinicians should investigate whether or not there is a meat allergy when there are unexplained allergy symptoms. In meat allergy, the allergic reaction is to the sugar in the meat, not the protein. This is the first food allergy to stem from sugars. The research shows that meat allergies tend to develop in adults who have tolerated meat all their lives, then, possibly due to a bee sting or tick bite, suddenly become meat allergic.

An Oral Immunotherapy for Peanut Allergy study revealed that children receiving increasing amount of peanut powder, could tolerate 20 peanuts after 10 months of treatment. A different three year study showed a significant number of children who were able to stop immunotherapy and can now eat peanuts successfully.

Check out this video from the conference about when oral immunotherapy may be ready to be used as a regular treatment for food allergy.

When you next visit your allergist, ask about these studies and how they may relate to your situation. I am glad to see that research is moving ahead, but I am also reminded that we have a ways to go before we can say food allergies are curable.

Eating Out with Food Allergies

Here is the perfect name for a site dedicated to helping people with food allergies dine away from home:

Lonely Plate

Sharona Schwartz has just launched lonelyplate.org, an interactive database that allows visitors to read and write reviews of restaurants, hotels, airlines and kid-friendly venues. The unique aspect is that the reviews pertain specifically to how food allergy and food sensitivity issues are managed.

So, let's say you're planning a trip and one or more family members has a food allergy. Check out the site to see which airline receives the highest ranking from other food allergy families. Read about restaurants at your your destination to choose the allergy friendly spots. Find out which hotels cater to food allergies. Then, after your trip, go to Lonely Plate and post some reviews yourself. It's a great way for food allergic families to share information.

Sharona has also made a commitment that if certain establishments continually pop up as mis-handling food allergy concerns, they will contact them to bring these reports to their attention and to offer help in amending procedures.

A win-win for all, I say. Check out lonelyplate.org and share some of your experiences.

The History of Peanut Allergies

There has been much speculation about the alarming increase in the number of people with peanut allergy. Over and over I hear people say, "I didn't know anyone with a peanut allergy when I was growing up and now most kids seem to be allergic to peanuts". Many of us have wondered what's happening to cause so many children to become peanut allergic.

Author and historian Heather Fraser, wondered the same thing. After extensive research, Heather has put her findings in a book due out later this month, The History of the Peanut Allergy Epidemic.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Heather some questions about her research and interest in this subject. Read on, it's fascinating...

What compelled you to write a book about the history of peanut allergy?

I am the mother of a peanut/tree nut allergic child and an historian trained in academic research. Over a year ago, I began to read in-depth about the history of food allergy. I learned about Charles Richet, who coined the term "anaphylaxis" (c.1913) and Clemens von Pirquet who in 1906 called these altered reactions "allergy". I combed the literature and discovered that outbreaks of peanut allergy began to occur only after WWII. The medical literature revealed a slow but noticeable growth of the allergy in children through the late 1960s up until the late 1980s. Around 1990, there was a sudden explosion of this allergy just in toddlers. This moment of acceleration is well-documented by ER records, cohort studies of the time and eyewitness accounts. Society finally noticed that something was wrong when these kids showed up for kindergarten. The sudden surge of peanut and food allergic kids took everyone by surprise -- school systems, teachers, parents, communities.

I knew that this story would be important to parents of peanut allergic children. We are living in something of an information vacuum.

Was it difficult to track down research on this topic?

No. It was not difficult at all, but it was time consuming. The events that led up to the epidemic of peanut allergy in children unfolded in plain sight – medical journals, newspapers, magazines, and books all document what took place.

The History of the Peanut Allergy Epidemic pinpoints the precise moment of the allergy’s appearance and describes the perfect storm of social, medical, political and economic factors from which it has grown. My thesis, regarding the precipitating cause of the peanut allergy epidemic will challenge every parent. I hesitate to cut to the chase because a full appreciation of the causes should be revealed gradually within the context of over 100 years of history. Otherwise, the conclusion may come as too big of a shock to the reader – my goal is to get people thinking and talking about the peanut allergy from a new direction -- which is, how we as a society have created this epidemic.

A 2010 statistic from Australia shows that now 3% of school aged children have peanut allergy – this ballooning PA population has developed in just 20 years. All stats show that UK has been the worst hit by PA followed by parts of Australia, Canada, Sweden, the US. I would expect our numbers to be similar to those in Australia (ACT).

What was the most surprising thing you learned about peanut allergy while researching The History of the Peanut Allergy Epidemic?

I discovered that I had defined anaphylaxis too narrowly. After reading Margie Profet’s The Function of Allergy: Immunological Defense Against Toxicity (1991), everything began to make sense.

According to Profet, anaphylaxis is a potentially deadly but evolutionarily programmed response to toxins/proteins that have penetrated first lines of natural defense and managed to enter the blood stream. All mammals exhibit anaphylaxis and have IgE. There is a debate in the medical literature over whether allergy is the outcome of a roulette style genetic predisposition to immune dysfunction OR is allergy an innate, purposeful immune response. It came as a surprise to me that allergy should have a function. The function is to protect the body against acute toxicity – the sneezing, itching, vomiting, diarrhea are attempts to eject a toxin as fast as possible; the drop in blood pressure to prevent the toxin from circulating to vital organs.

And researchers know “how to” create anaphylaxis – they create the condition regularly and easily in mice and other animals in labs. Richet created anaphylaxis time and again in his raw meat experiments with dogs and other animals over 100 years ago. None of the functional mechanisms of sensitizing a mammal are new to medicine. What seems to have happened today is that we have lost the threads and landmarks of the story as a whole. My book attempts to bring back the history and answer the question: how did millions of people, especially children, in the last 20 years become allergic to this one food? Although my conclusions are meticulously if not obsessively documented, they may still be difficult to accept.

What is the take-away you hope people will get after reading the book?

I hope to get parents thinking and talking about peanut allergy in more complete and broader terms than we do now. It is not a coincidence that hundreds of thousands of toddlers became allergic to the same food, at the same time, around 1990, and in just certain countries. Something precipitated and continues to cause this allergy almost exclusively in children – and more in boys than girls in a 2:1 ratio.

Where can people learn more about the book?

Visit http://www.peanutallergyepidemic.com for a time line and a first chapter free download. Next week I will begin selling copies of the book from the site via credit card (Visa®).
There is a contact form at the website and I do have advance copies of the book available. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

We've all been wondering. Heather's research will now give us some of the answers. I couldn't help but shake my head as I read the first downloaded chapter. I had no idea...

Buy a copy for yourself, your allergist, the school nurse and your peanut allergic child. This book will clear up many questions and will, no doubt, have you shaking your head too.

Egg Allergy Study Shows Postitive Results

This is big news!

We really are getting closer to a food allergy cure. AAAAI (American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology) made an exciting announcement at their annual conference which began in New Orleans Feb. 26 and continues through March 2.

The announcement involved a multi-center trial including Duke, Johns Hopkins, Mount Sinai, National Jewish and the University of Arkansas. The trial involved 55 children between the ages of 5-18.

All had egg allergy- notice the word "had".

Some of the participants received a placebo. The other group received egg white solid oral immunotherapy. That means this group was given increasing amounts of egg protein in a controlled setting.

The results? After 44 weeks, both groups were tested and 21 of the 40 receiving the egg protein, are no longer egg allergic. The 15 who were in the placebo group continue to have egg allergy.

Here's the full press release from the conference.

We're making forward movement on this!!!