These are all pretty far off topic, so I figured I’d start a new thread.
Will allergy shots work for food allergies? If not, why not? If so, why can’t people just get the shots instead of having to avoid the food for the rest of their lives?
Why are people with shellfish allergies generally allergic to all types of shellfish? I would guess that oysters and crabs are less closely related than, say, cows and sheep, but I gather that it’s possible to be allergic to beef but not lamb.
Very intelligent questions! I’ll see what I can answer.
Allergy Shots for Food Allergies: No, there is no shot or medication for preventing an allergic reaction to food. They are working on it though. The best treatment right now is total avoidance. In children it can sometimes allow their allergy to develop away. Researchers think that is because if the immature immune system isn’t exposed to the allergen it might “forget about it” when it matures. In adults total avoidance over many years CAN but not always lessens the reaction the next time the person is accidentally exposed. Adults do not outgrow allergies.
Shellfish: Not everyone is allergic to all kinds. Some people just react to lobster, some just shrimp, etc. However, we get into that cross-contamination thing again where most of the time kitchens are preparing many types of shellfish using the same utensils and pots and pans. The most severely allergic are the ones that usually cross-react as they call it. One example of this is the shellfish that you mentioned. More examples would be all legumes, all latex family (bananas, avocados, etc.), and all animals’ milks. The reason why this happens is that the proteins are similar enough that the immune system reacts to them as the same.
Lunchmeats: Read the ingredient on your package of bologna sometime. Chances are it will have a milk derivitive unless it’s Kosher. Things that come from cow’s milk are besides the obvious casein (sodium caseinate), lactalbumin, lactoglobulin, lactose, and whey. Now, Louis Rich SMOKED turkey does not have any of these (last time I read the label), but all of their other varieties do (last time I read their labels). Milk derivitives are in pretty near everything you can buy in the grocery store. Maybe not all brands, but chances are one brand will have put it in there.
Interesting observation about allergies “developing away”. When my 2 y.o. son was tested for peanuts, he was deathly allergic. When he was retested at 8 y.o, he tested negative. However, the only way to definitively rule him allergy-free was to do a something I think was called “challenge response test”. In other words, he would have to check into a medical facility, be exposed to peanuts, with doctors hovering. If he had a bad reaction, there was a substantial chance that he could die anyway. We decided that wanting to be able to eat peanut butter was a poor reason to take a major risk like that, so we continue to act as if he’s still very allergic.
Speaking of cross-allergies, I sometimes have a reaction to other legumes like peas and soybeans. I don’t know why it’s selective like that, but I generally just try and avoid all legumes.
JoltSucker, forgive the question, since you should raise your child as you see fit, but wouldn’t it be better to do the “challenge response test” with doctors hovering, instead of the off chance that your son might one day by mistake eat food containing peanuts? As someone mentioned in the other thread, many items now contain peanuts in one way or another, besides peanut butter.
I’ve always wondered why eating scallops causes me to vomit in a projectile manner, while I can eat shrimp, lobster, clams, crabs, essentially all other seafood and shellfish. Do scallops have an especially high level of some allergen that other shellfish have in very small quantities, or what? I also (random allergy information) am mildly allergic to iodine – got hives from that iodine drip they give you for a CAT scan.
Arnold Winkelried, the most prudent thing to do for now is to just do allergy tests, hoping that he’ll continue to test negative. The worst offender is chocolate and cookies, and he’s very cautious about both. The school nurse also has one of his Epi-Pens. He’s at an age where he won’t touch anyt food with a sauce, so fancy sauces with peanut butter aren’t a problem.
When he gets to be full-grown (and his windpipe is adult-sized), then we’ll do the challenge-response test.
First, don’t all seafood including ocean fish contain iodine?
Secondly, I’m not a dr. but I’ll try and explain what it sounds like. If you are only having digestive complaints that is what they call 1 target area. No matter how bad it is an allergic with one target area is not as severe as someone that breaks out in a couple of hives and has stomach cramps because that is 2 target areas. (Or throws up and gets an allergic cough, something like that) The more target areas effected the more severe the reaction.
So, what I’m trying to say is that you are probably allergic to scallops but not other seafood, yet. The immune system is a strange thing though. Not quite understood completely. It’s possible that by exposing yourself to scallops your reaction could become more severe and you could then start reacting to other shellfish. But who knows really?
That’s the way I’ve found it, and I’m allergic to cow’s milk. Small amounts, however, don’t cause too much problem though, bit it’s easy to let low-key problems creep up on you from supermarket prepared foods.
But it is usually a matter of just cow’s milk, not all animal’s milk, because it has to do with genetically specific proteins. There are, of course, goat’s-milk products available, but at much higher cost, including feta cheese. I don’t know if anyone is allergic to the milk of more than one animal. My dictionary says feta cheese can also be made from ewe’s milk.
Ray (Having now admitted to a limited milk allergy, I’m sure our onboard poster analysts will now attribute my concern about the foul and socially negatively significant behaviors of doctors and lawyers generally and systematically, as personally experienced and regularly read of in periodicals, as a common reaction of cow’s-milk allergy. Wonder what sort of allergy causes posters to claim other posters that disagree with them are all nuts. )
Well, I had cow’s-milk allergy as a child and was put on goat’s milk, I think at the age of about 7 (about 1 yr before that test on children in 1939, that concluded that almost half of cow’s-milk-allergic children did better on goat’s milk), and it appeared to clear up the problem. However, I don’t remember what and how severe the symptoms were. I was given fresh goat’s for a while (which, I guess, is a little risky as to other problems) and then canned goat’s milk, for maybe 2 yr. The stuff was too expensive though, and I soon outgrew the allergy.
The cow’s-milk allergy returned in about my late 40s. I just quit drinking any milk and eating much ice cream. I didn’t do a lot about avoiding the impossible number of prepared solid foods available in food stores.
Anyhow, the goat’s milk seemed to work for me as a kid. As far as that test on lab animals, they can stuff that. The author of that Web-page article doesn’t even say what animal was used in that test. Also, note that the article was written by an MD and keeps saying “consult a pediatrician” (MD). Good busines for the guild, yes. Other MDs likely to know anything more than she, if she’d looked in Medline prior to writing the article, no. There are other evaluations of mine on the MB, of MDs – from personal experience and from articles they write. From that article, I might believe that less than 50% of cow’s-milk allergics were helped by substituting goat’s milk, but that’s still a lot of children. I’ve never really looked into the clinical literature on that subject.
And I forgot to mention that I think I’m allergic also to soy, and that’s about as prevalent in prepared foods in food stores as is cow’s milk. Are many people allergic to soy?
And another is mayonnaise. I’m not allergic to eggs, and isn’t the only other thing in that stuff sodium calcium EDTA? I guess a problem with that wouldn’t be called a classic allergy, but rather some sort of atopy.
I too have had strange food allergies. by strange I mean, late appearing. When I was a child I could and did eat seafood by the ton (I grew up on the east coast of GA) shrimp, crab, lobster, ect. I also loved PB and J (don’t all kids). Then I hit puberty and WHAM. I cannot touch seafood at all, it makes me very very sick. I cannot have peanuts or obviously peanut butter because I swell up like a republican. No amount of allergy pills and or shots has been able to remedy this. Let me add one more thing to the pile : NutraSweet. I cannot have it or I will get massive migraines. Yay. So I’ll take the pound of shrimp with peanut sauce and a Diet Coke please ? Oh, and call an ambulance.
“A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject.” - Seneca
Interestingly, this 2nd stated no relationship exists between seafood allergies & iodine allergies. It only mentions plain iodine (skin cleanser), though. I have always read that there WAS an association between seafood allergies and “contrast” allergies (contrast=Injectable iodine-containing organic compounds used in X-Ray studies).
I found a citation for a journal article (without an abstract unfortunately) that I’ll check on tomorrow to resolve this.
A couple of key points:
In contrast to other food allergies, allergies to seafood & peanuts are not “outgrown”.
People often are allergic to just one or a few different kinds of shellfish, probably due to the IgE being directed to a region of a protein that varies a lot from class to class. Others have IgE molecules directed against an area with less variability, and react to more varieties.
Sue from El Paso
Siamese Attack Puppet - Texas
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Believe, me, SoMoMom, I haven’t been repeatedly retesting scallops to see if they still make me violently ill (plus hives - didn’t mention that) – two incidents was replication enough. My last scallop was circa 20 years ago, but I eat all other seafood freely and nothing bad has ever happened. I did make them use something else for my c-section, besides iodine. Didn’t want to have my delivery turn into some scene out of ER . . .
“It won’t do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law
and lawyers.” Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
ranulfa, no fun, is it? So, you have 2 target areas’ symptoms. Worse than one, but not as bad as 3 target areas or anaphylaxis. I don’t know how they’ve decided this stuff, I just know that no matter how bad the one target area reacts, the severity is measured by the number of target areas effected. For me, one of my allergens is milk and the effects are so mild that I didn’t even realize it until they went away when I went dairy-free for nursing my baby. (I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome by one dr. and spastic colon by another dr. and with dermatitis by a dermatologist. They do come back when I’ve tried to cheat or been accidentally exposed too.) But I have 2 target areas effected (skin and digestive) so it’s considered more severe than someone that breaks out in hives until their eyes swell shut but the skin is the only target area effected. It’s kind of hard to grasp sometimes, but I just say “OK, whatever” because I’m not a dr. My allergy to aspartame is much more annoying, but it only breaks me out in a itchy, burning rash so it is not as severe as my milk allergy. My allergic reactions to pork and something in soda (yet unidentified) are similar (skin, digestive, breathing) but with pork my blood pressure also drops so it is worse. Did I explain severity alright?
I didn’t mean you are trying to expose yourself. (And I really was asking about the iodine because I don’t know. I thought that seafood was a source for iodine in the diet.) I was trying to explain that severity sometimes increases as people are exposed either on purpose or on accident to their allergen. I guess I worded it wrong. :o Everyone that has discussed it in the allergy support groups I belong to would agree that it USUALLY does increase, but you can’t predict what is going to happen. So, I was saying that you can’t predict what would happen in the future with you and other shellfish.
BTW, 2 reactions to pork was all it took for me to not eat it anymore too. You’d think once would be enough wouldn’t you?
Unfortunately I kept getting cross-contamination exposures until I got vigilant on that. The last time I was exposed, the cook had made my husband’s ham steak and my beef steak on different grills, but he forgot and used the same spatula for both. We were almost to the emergency room before the benedryl kicked in that time. Normal procedure is take the benedryl and drive toward the nearest emergency room until the benedryl kicks in. My allergist won’t give me an epi-pen until I’ve had to actually check into an emergency room. He says the side-effects are too severe.
OK, I read the “article”. It was actually a Letter to the Editor (and thus not subject to peer review, etc.) of AJR (American Journal of Radiology) Sep 1997, p.906-7.
In summary, it says there are studies supporting an association between shellfish allergies & contrast allergies, but that the preponderence of more recent articles refutes this. But the author advises that all patients be queried about shellfish (among other) allergies, and if a positive history is obtained, that non-ionic contrast (less likely to cause allergies) be used for persons with mild reactions to shellfish, and that consideration be given to pretreating with steroids & anti-histamines for persons with more severe reactions to shellfish.
In other words, this is the he learned it & his own literature review to the contrary, this is the way he intends to continue practicing.
Remeber what I said about the peer review process ensuring the the final conclusions & recommendations are reasonably well supported by the data presented???
)
(And I really was asking about the iodine because I don’t know. I thought that seafood was a source for iodine in the diet.) I was trying to explain that severity sometimes increases as people are exposed either on purpose or on accident to their allergen. I guess I worded it wrong. :o Everyone that has discussed it in the allergy support groups I belong to would agree that it USUALLY does increase, but you can’t predict what is going to happen. So, I was saying that you can’t predict what would happen in the future with you and other shellfish.