A couple of allergy stories have emerged in the press recently including a Mail on Sunday reporter being told she has allergies to sixty food types. I’m not a doctor (well not a medical one anyway) and although there may be some cases where people are allergic to that many different food types, it would be extremely rare.
I’m delighted that the Daily Mail article highlights the potential dangers of these dodgy, expensive, allergy tests which are not based on scientific evidence and can of course lead to people cutting out important and necessary food groups from their diet.
The FSA spends a lot of time and money investigating food allergies so I read with intrigue the report in the i newspaper that suggested researchers in the United States could be close to finding a ‘cure’ for peanut allergy after finding that giving daily drops of increasing doses of peanut protein to children suffering from peanut allergy built up their tolerance to the protein. Although the article gives a slightly more positive spin on the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology’s press release, this is a really interesting piece of science and gives real hope to peanut allergy sufferers that there may be an effective treatment one day.
In scientific terms there is rarely an ‘overnight cure’ for anything, which is why we won’t be accepting this as ‘the cure’ but will certainly be looking at the results of this study, alongside longer term projects, such as the Leap and Eat study which have been commissioned by the Agency to investigate whether early introduction of allergenic foods can prevent food allergies developing.
These things take time so the FSA won’t be announcing an overnight ‘cure’. However, I remain optimistic that as the evidence develops, one day there may be a treatment for food allergies.