"peanut allergy" news and stories

Here's some promising news for the more than 1.5 million Americans with peanut allergies: Researchers with the United States Department of Agriculture say they are getting closer to developing a safer, hypoallergenic peanut.

In a presentation this week at the congress of the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) in London, USDA research scientist Soheila Maleki described how her team measured the allergen levels of 900 peanut varieties and found that some with genetic mutations lacked, or had lower amounts, of a major allergen.

They also discovered it was possible to breed these varieties to get peanut seeds with lower levels of allergens, and that these allergens were less able to bind to antibodies that cause allergic reactions.

Doctors say that misdiagnosed food allergies in children are on the rise, apparently because of false positives on common allergy blood tests, reports the New York Times. These blood tests may only accurately identify allergies in 50 percent of the cases, leading to children being put on unnecessarily restrictive diets. Kids who are allergic to peanuts, for example, could test positive for soy, green bean, pea and kidney beans because they have similar proteins. One doctor even had a case where a child was being fed through a feeding tube because he'd been diagnosed as allergic to ALL foods. Once more accurate tests were performed, 20 foods were immediately declared safe.

"The only true test of whether you're allergic to a food or not is whether you can eat it and not react to it," says pediatrician Dr. David Fleischer.

Moreover, some doctors now think that introducing potentially allergenic foods like peanuts and shellfish is better done earlier than delaying until the currently recommended 2 or 3 years, as early exposure may reduce allergy risk.

Source

Thanks to the work of a North Carolina food scientist, help is on the way for the more than half million U.S. residents who suffer from life-threatening peanut allergies.

Dr. Mohamed Ahmedna of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University has devised a way to deactivate peanut allergens. The allergens are removed by processing rather than by breeding. All of this has no effect on the peanut's taste or quality, and may actually make them easier to process.

Ahmedna's discovery is also a boon for peanut farmers, who produce the U.S.' 12th largest crop valued at some to $1 billion a year. His work is good news for folks with other food allergies, too. Ahmedna is tweaking his process to remove allergens from other foods.

Source

At Duke University, researchers have been engaged in an experiment that could change the lives of those with severe food allergies. Those allergies trigger approximately 30,000 emergency-room visits each year and are sometimes the result of an exposure to a very tiny amount of allergen. This new study suggests that gradually increasing exposure to even smaller amounts of the allergen can build up a resistance - especially in children - and prevent one mouthful of the wrong food from becoming deadly.

In the study, children were given amounts of defatted peanut flour or an egg powder - very common, but serious, allergens - as small as 1/3,000th of a peanut or about 1/1,000th of an egg (under supervision at the Duke Hospital). Taken in pill form daily, the dosage was increased bi-weekly until the children were consuming the equivalent of 1/10th of an egg or 1 peanut, which became a maintenance dose that they took daily throughout the study, which lasted about 2 years. At that point, 4 of the 7 egg-allergic children could eat two scrambled eggs without any type of reaction (2 more could eat that much before reacting) and many of the peanut-allergic children could eat up to 15 peanuts before starting to experience a reaction.

At this time, researchers strongly recommend that you do not try this type of treatment at home, because it can be dangerous without careful monitoring. To the parents who joined in, however, the success could prove to be a lifesaver for their children and, as a result, researchers are optimistic that there could be a highly effective treatment available to parents and children within five years.

Source

There's a lot of banning of foods going on these days - first sodas from school campuses to help fight childhood obesity, and now...nuts. With the seeming increase in peanut and other tree-nut allergies, schools, restaurants and airlines are banning foods that contain peanuts, almonds, walnuts, and other tree nuts.

I understand the idea behind "banning" say, sodas from schools. Sodas and junk foods are blamed for the decline in nutrition and increase of childhood obesity, so they must be removed from school campuses, where the target audience is likely not able to make wise, informed choices. They are children.

But peanuts? I do not particularly love peanuts, almonds, walnuts, or things that contain them like peanut butter. And I certainly understand the severity and gravity of nut allergies. In schools, removing nuts might be a good idea based on the same idea with sodas - that children with allergies don't always know what they're eating. However, it seems somewhat extreme to ban these foods from restaurants and airplanes, as if adult consumers weren't smart enough to make the choice not to eat something that is potentially life threatening to themselves.

If you have a peanut allergy, don't you know that you do? If you have a peanut allergy, you are careful about what you eat and don't have a problem asking what's in a certain food. If you have a life-threatening allergy, you're probably carrying an epi-pen, too.