As allergies surge, an ancient cure?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000

We were in Hawaii five years ago, eating at the kind of fish restaurant where, maybe, you’d want to wear a shirt with sleeves and shorts that didn’t double as a bathing suit. Once we were seated, our waiter got all poetic about the nut-crusted opa and Mom warned him that she had food allergies, just a few. From his back pocket, the server immediately withdrew a deck of pink cards that looked like a prescription pad, thumbed one off the top of the stack and placed it down on the table. Bookended by triple asterisks, it read "GUEST ALLERGY CARD," all bold, all caps; its instructions: "List All Problem Foods." The word "All" was double-underlined for emphasis because double-underlining, it seemed, was the top defense against anaphylactic shock.

It was a surprising intervention at the time, this card, but its presentation had a clear antecedent. Even five years ago, benchmark publications like the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and Current Opinion in Immunology were releasing figures signaling an allergic surge. The number of people reporting peanut allergy had doubled. Food allergy on the whole was escalating. It now affects 6 percent of young children and 3-4 percent of adults in the United States. Emergency rooms are seeing an estimated 125,000 patients annually for food allergy, and 15,000 patients per year for food-induced anaphylaxis. Eager to self-diagnose as we are, between 20 and 30 percent of Americans now believe they have some kind of food allergy whether, in fact, they do.

Salon.com > Howie Kahn

As allergies surge, an ancient cure?