Most people who watch what they eat are concerned about gaining weight. But for those who suffer from severe food allergies, watching what they eat can be a matter of life or death. In recent years, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with allergies to foods like peanuts and milk. Doctors aren't sure why. KPBS Health Reporter Kenny Goldberg has the story.
Nathan Wagner looks like your typical happy-go-lucky six-year-old. Except, he's got a problem most kids his age never even have to think about. Nathan is highly allergic to a number of different foods.
Wagner: Soy, peanut, egg, milk, cantaloupe, kiwi, mustard.
A couple of months ago, Nathan accidentally took a drink out of his sister's cup. It contained milk. He had an immediate reaction.
Nathan: It started getting hard to breathe, and I was coughing, wheezing, my throat got tight, nervous, and really scared.
Sue Wagner is Nathan's mom. She first realized Nathan had a problem when he was about ten months old.
Wagner: He had had some macaroni cheese and Cheerios, and just slowly but surely started getting hives and swelling up, and turning pink, and we decided to take him to the emergency room. Following that, we went ahead and did some allergy testing to confirm what it was, and it was food-related, for sure.
Food allergies affect about eight percent of children under four in the United States. Doctors say the prevalence appears to be on the upswing. Dr. Michael Welch is an allergist in San Diego. He says when he first started in practice years ago, he would see about one new patient a month with a food allergy.
Dr. Michael Welch: Now, I must be seeing one new patient a week, maybe two, and where they're coming in and they have a food allergy, and it's frequently peanut or tree nut.
Welch says there appears to be a genetic component to allergies. And he says modern man's ultra-hygienic environment may be a contributing factor. And as for cures…they're aren't any.
Welch: We only have avoidance, and we also have patients always carry with them, epinephrine.
Epinephrine is a hormone that's packaged in a single-dose injection device. If someone has an acute allergic reaction, a dose buys about 15 minutes of relief. A person still has to get to a hospital as soon as possible.The rise in food allergies has helped stimulate more research into potential therapies. One of the studies in the pipeline is looking at using vaccines to reverse food allergies. Another is exploring whether placing a modified protein under the tongue could help.
Dr. Scott Sicherer is a researcher at the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital.
Sicherer says the research hasn't produced anything definitive, yet. For now, he says it's crucial that people know how to protect themselves. Fortunately, Sicherer says some kids grow out of their allergies. For example, he says about one in five lose their allergy to peanuts.
Sicherer: We think that only about five to ten percent outgrow their allergy to tree nuts, like walnut, Brazil, cashew, pecan, those type of things. It also seems that outgrowing a fish or shellfish allergy is difficult to do. But for foods like milk, egg, wheat, and soy, which are common problems for the young children, most, about 80 to 85 percent outgrow those allergies by the time they're about five years old.
That hasn't happened to little Nathan Wagner. So his mother Sue helped start a food allergy support group in San Diego. About 150 families are involved. Sue Wagner says it's helped her get a sense of community.
Wagner: And you realize that because you live this lifestyle, and it's really a lifestyle, that you don't quite understand the magnitude of it until you've lived it, when you meet other people doing the same thing, it really is a comforting thing.
Each year in the U.S., food allergies cause up to 30,000 severe reactions, and more than 150 deaths. That doesn't sound like a big number. But doctors say the problem is there's no way to know who's at risk of becoming severely ill -- or even dying from an allergic reaction.
Kenny Goldberg, KPBS News.
