I don’t recall ever hearing about allergies growing up in the 60s and 70s but everyone seems to have them nowadays. Has Earth turned against us or are Humans weaker than they used to be?
I was born in 1965 and I’ve been told I suffered from allergies then. They gave me asthma attacks. And my older brothers suffered from the same things.
And probably the generation before that.
According to the OED, “hay fever” first appeared in print in 1829 and the same condition shows up in an 1819 medical journal under the name “summer cattarh”.
Allergies are a disease of affluence.
Almost unheard of before the 19th Century, they started to blossom then among the upper-middle to upper classes of North America and Europe. Now, 1 in 5 people in the industrialized world suffers from some form of allergy.
There is a theory that too much cleanliness contributes to the problem, as well as a lack of things like intestinal parasites. Really. Seems pre-19th century/pre-industrial revolution folks were exposed to bazillions of germs growing up, and just about everyone had some form of parasites like intestinal worms. Our immunes systems (so goes the theory) are adapted to having a certain number of such assaults. When kids are protected from germs and don’t get parasites, or get very few and those are blasted away quickly with drugs, you wind up with a part of the immunue system looking for invaders and finding none - so it over-reacts to proteins like pollen or those in certain foods.
Also, children used to be breast-fed longer in primative societies, which may have prevented food allergies. And there may be other factors at work, since we are talking about the immune system here and that’s a pretty complex system.
So, if you’re a parent be sure to let your kids play in the mud and such, and don’t go overboard on the handcleaners and stuff. They need to get out and experience a little raw nature, it seems.
Anyhow - wherever sanitation goes up and parasite levels go down you get a certain percentage of the population getting allergies. One of the drawbacks of civilization, apparently.
George Carlin agrees too Broomstick. He says he used to play in Raw Sewage and that made his immune system strong.
I was referred to some quack masquerading as an ontolaryngologist a couple of years ago for a throat problem I was having. He tested me for allergies and the test came back positive for most foods and inhalants, depite the fact that I had never had worse than an occasional sneeze while mowing the grass. He started me on a strict and expensive diet and weekly immunotherapy injections (and his office was always packed with people there for similar treatments). It never made to seemed to make much difference.
It turned out that I had a hiatal hernia (diagnosed by a gastroenterologist) and was suffering from constant acid reflux that was scarring my esophagus and throat. I quit the injections and diet after stomach surgery fixed the problem.
I have come to the conclusion since that this allergy doc was a one trick pony running a cozy little scam out of his office and bilking patients and insurance companies out of lots of money. This is a multi-million dollar industry preying on peoples’ psychosomatic susceptabilities. Tell someone they’ve got allergies, and BAM they’ve got allergies. I was suspicious the whole time and never fell for it.
The tests were bogus. Inject enough of any common “allergen” under the skin and anyone will have a reaction.
Further evidence that it’s all in your brain: My grandmother suffered from lifelong “severe allergies.” She had to use hypo-allergenic cosmetics and eat carefully and take pills for animals and pollen. Then in her late sixties she had a stroke. Suddenly no more allergies! How does THAT work?
Broomstick and [Rib Eye**: What a load of codswallop. I grew up in the country, amid a healthy variety of plants and critters, without regular visits to a doctor, and without air-conditioning or any other “protective” technology. I have allergies to both pets and pollen. You try to tell me that my red and watery eyes, prolonged fits of violent sneezing, mucosal sludge, and occasional mysterious swellings of the face and hands are “all in my head,” and I will tell you to go to hell. You try to tell me that I was affluent, protected, pampered, or coddled, and I – well, I won’t try to tell you anything, because you probably can’t hear me with your head up there.
I suppose you guys don’t believe in histamine either? Rather than pretend allergies are new or don’t exist, one should recognize the obvious; people didn’t care about a few sneezes when their children were dropping dead. Like cancer, allergies are less noticeable against a cluttered background
Food allergies are extremely well established in the medical literature and have been known for at least a century. Soy formulas were developed in the early part of the 20th century for babies who could not drink cow’s milk formulas.
Allergies are not quite a disease of affluence, but going to the doctor definitely is correlated with affluence. As Nametag says, poor people did not go to a doctor unless the problem was truly life-threatening. Food allergies are generally rare (about 1-2 percent of the adult population) and generally not life-threatening, the occasional anaphylactic shock notwithstanding. (And nothing could be done about that then anyway.) It’s true that many children do become allergic to milk but the vast majority would grow out of this by age three, another reason not to take allergies as a serious problem.
Today, many more people go to doctors and it is far easier to diagnose allergies. Much more can be done for them, and many more alternative products exist for food allergies. And that’s a good thing, not a sign of decadence.
Rib Eye – The fact that you were misdiagnosed by a quack does not negate the existence of allergies. Every day, quacks tell people that they have cancer so that they can offer expensive bogus therapies. This does not mean that cancer does not exist, it means that there are some unscrupulous doctors preying on gullible and uninformed patients.
The fact that people both develop and grow out of allergies over the course of their lives also does not mean that the allergies are all in their heads. Do you suppose that the people who die every year of anaphylactic shock because of severe allergic reactions do so only because someone told them to?
How do you explain the fact that the first time I was given penicillin, I had no reaction (which would lead me to believe that I was NOT allergic), and yet the second time I developed a rash all over my legs? Although I was not aware of it at the time, this is a classic presentation of penicillin allergy – it appears on the second exposure.
I don’t believe in psychic phenomena, yet somehow I always know when I’m in the presence of an (unseen) cat, because I start to develop a range of allergy symptoms.
It is true that exposure to a certain level of germs and allergens helps develop a healthy immune system. But allergies run in families. My father, who grew up in the 1930’s, had severe hay fever, which ultimately abated somewhat. My brother is allergic to guinea pigs to the point where he had to be sent home the first time he held one, because his eyes had swelled shut. He had certainly never been told that he would have that reaction, because no one was aware of the problem.
I’m sorry that you were conned, Rib Eye, but allergies are very real.
This is true of all allergies. The body creates antibodies to the first incursion and then the antibodies overreact (to oversimplify) on the next and subsequent exposures.