Tag: health

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Allergies to nuts, grains, vegetables, seafood and milk are common. Allergies to meat? Much less so. But that’s starting to change.

A few months ago I read about adults (author John Grisham in particular) developing an allergy to red meat after being bitten by ticks.* And not just a low-level allergy like your face turning red — we’re talking full-on hives and anaphylactic** shock, the kind of thing that requires you to carry an Epi-Pen to make sure you keep breathing long enough to reach the emergency room.

Researchers have determined that the lone star tick’s bite can cause the body to produce an IgE antibody for a sugar called alpha-gal, which is found in mammal meat.

The result: from then on, you’re allergic to meat.

CNN calls it mysterious. Allergic Living calls it baffling. It’s certainly weird compared to “usual” allergies, and the fact that the reaction is usually delayed by a few hours makes it hard to diagnose, but we’re ahead of the game in understanding it: Unlike most allergies, we know what causes this one.

With most allergies, we know the process, but we don’t know what gets the ball rolling to begin with. We know that in people who are allergic to a food, exposure to it causes an IgE antibody reaction that triggers a massive release of histamines that sends the body into some level of shock, but we don’t know why some people have that reaction and others don’t.

There are a lot of ideas being investigated, with varying amounts of supporting evidence, but there’s still nothing we can point to and say: “This caused you to be allergic to nuts” or “That caused you to be allergic to milk.” Advice to parents concerned about keeping their child from developing allergies is all over the map.

2025 Update

When I posted this back in 2012, I segued into a call for fundraising for research. The particular fundraiser has since been discontinued, but research has dramatically improved both medical understanding and practical actions around allergies.

First: it’s been clearly demonstrated that early introduction of a food lowers the risk of a child developing an allergy to it. It’s not a guarantee, but at least there’s clear advice to parents now!

Plus, immunotherapy and IgE-targeting treatments can reduce sensitivity and severity (though they can’t always eliminate reactions entirely) for those of us who already have severe allergies, those who develop allergies as adults, and the (much smaller!) percentage of children who still develop food allergies even with early exposure.

Unfortunately there’s still no clear explanation for why that ~3% of children who do have early exposure still go on to develop allergies — or why some people bitten by the lone star tick develop what is now called alpha-gal syndrome and others don’t.

Advice these days is basically: Try not to get bitten by ticks, and if you do develop the allergy, stop eating red meat.

Notes

*Naturally, this was a few days after I hiked a severely overgrown trail without taking precautions against ticks, so I freaked out a bit, but I also hadn’t found any ticks when I got home from the hike.

**Fun fact: Chrome’s spell-checker doesn’t know “anaphylactic,” and suggested such helpful alternatives as “intergalactic” and “anticlimactic.” Not sure about the former, but I get the impression a lot of viewers suffered “anticlimactic shock” when watching the Lost finale.

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I’m not sure who annoys me more:

  • The people who think that those of us who have food allergies are all a bunch of whining hypochondriacs and/or drama queens who just want attention, and the tiny percentage who really do have allergies shouldn’t expect to ever eat outside the home, or…
  • The people who lie about having allergies because they’re afraid that “I don’t like this ingredient” won’t get the point across, thereby convincing the jerkwads that they’re right.

Remind me not to read these kinds of articles. And especially not the comments on them. And especially not the ratings on the comments.

When it comes to diners’ dietary demands, how much is too much? – Inside Scoop SF

Originally posted on Google+

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I got the pertussis vaccine this morning. California is experiencing an epidemic of pertussis, its worst in 55 years, with 4,223 cases as of September 21….and 9 deaths, all infants too young to be vaccinated. The state Department of Public Health is recommending that anyone who expects to spend time around infants get a booster shot. If you can’t get pertussis yourself, then you can’t pass it on to your children (or the kids you’re babysitting, etc.).

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I finally got my H1N1 flu shot today. My allergist called me this morning to say that they’d gotten five — yes, just 5 — doses of the vaccine, and wanted to know if I wanted one.

The CDC has been recommending for months that anyone with chronic respiratory conditions (*cough* asthma *cough*) get both the swine flu and seasonal flu vaccines, so I asked about it the last time I was in for a check-up. The office was expecting it sometime in October. That stretched out to late October, then November, then they began to wonder if they were going to get it at all.

Distribution on this thing has been just abysmal. I mean, I got the seasonal flu shot in September. And there have been other areas of the country that got so many doses they started offering them to the general public more than a month ago, because they didn’t have enough people in high-risk groups who wanted it.

Meanwhile, H1N1 proceeded to establish itself as the main flu of the season. I wasn’t terribly enthused about the possibility of being completely wiped out for several days and quarantining myself for another week afterward…

I did research other sources, though perhaps not as thoroughly as I could have. I checked in a couple of times at my regular doctor’s office, but they were in the same boat. I checked Google Flu Shot [Edit: This was a service that let you search Google Maps for flu shot providers that had the vaccine in stock, and is no longer available.] at least once a week after it launched, though it was always either empty or full of locations marked “Temporarily out of stock.”

Actually, I’d pretty much written it off at this point, figuring the vaccine would be available sometime in, I don’t know, February or March, by which time I’d either have gotten the flu or wouldn’t be getting it this year anyway. When my phone rang I figured it had something to do with an appointment I’d rescheduled.

For the record: no noticeable side effects (so far), and hardly any pain. My shoulder hurts less than it did after the seasonal flu shot I got a few months ago, and even that didn’t hurt much (and only after a few hours). Also, there was a patient survey and information sheet that went along with it instead of the standard “I solemnly swear that I am not allergic to eggs” (they grow the vaccine in eggs) waiver.

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I’ve been frequenting a couple of nearby smoothie shops this summer, including Jamba Juice. Lately they’ve got an interesting contest:

Live to be 100 Sweepstakes

OK, it’s a sweepstakes promoting a book on “Hundreds of ways to live to be 100,” but the way the promo is phrased makes me think of a different kind of contest entirely. I mean, it seems pretty clear who wins: anyone who enters, then lives to be 100, wins.

So what do you give the lucky 100-year-olds as prizes? A lifetime supply of smoothies?

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Time to add an “outrage” category. This is just insane: A church panel has invalidated a girl’s communion because she can’t eat wheat (original article here).

The girl has celiac disease, which means any amount of wheat can cause her serious health problems. A local priest was willing to let her use a rice-based wafer, but higher-ups declared it was invalid — that if there wasn’t wheat, it didn’t count. She can either take the communion with a wheat-based wafer, or not take it at all.

For all intents and purposes they’ve excommunicated this girl because of a medical condition.

Good thing I’m not Catholic and the sacrament doesn’t involve peanuts.

I wonder if the church would be willing to pay for emergency room visits (or funerals) resulting from this kind of situation?