Why are so many children allergic to everything now days?

[Mummysharkdoodoodoo]

Watching grand designs and the couple have two children who are allergic to most things. Even the doctor was surprised that they were so ill on such high tablets.

Why are children allergic to more and more things now days?

What causes it?

I think partly it is greater awareness. DS had CMPA as an infant. As did his uncle in the 60s. Comparing stories with MIL it took her months to realise what was causing BILs symptoms. While we now know milk is the most common allergy in infants she had no idea it could be a problem.

But there is a lot that is attractive about the dirt theory although it still needs more research.

l believe could be because of over zealousness in sterilising and disinfecting everything. When l was a child we had one sink in the house, the kitchen sink. No bathroom - a tin bath which was used once a week. The toilet was outside.
These days women are encouraged to bleach/disinfect everything. The children don't get the chance to get dirty like we did, which means they don't get the opportunity to build their immune systems when they're young. l remember when l was a child, if a little one dropped a dummy, the mother (or whoever was closest at the time) would pick it up, put it in their own mouth, then give it back to the child. We played out in the back lanes (cobbled, like Coronation Street), got dirty, and generally had a whale of a time. l don't remember any children l went to school with having allergies except me, and that was to penicillin. Having said that l'm now badly allergic to most antibiotics. So far as l know there's only one l can safely take without a reaction, so we have to be very careful not to over prescribe it for fear of either setting off another allergy, or becoming resistant.
l'm also allergic to blue cheese and white Stilton, which l've been told is because of the mould culture used, but if the cheese is cooked, killing the bacteria, l'm fine.

If you read old books, you have a lot of ‘delicate’ children, ‘sickly’ children, children who ‘waste away’ or ‘decline’. I often wonder how many of these were severe allergies, coeliac disease, asthma etc

Quite a few but our there would also have been a lot of viral infections that we now vaccinate against and bacterial infections that we now can easily treat with antibiotics. Our knowledge of medicine has been transformed over the last century.

But I do wonder a lot about asthma (which DS also has). His experience of having asthma is very different from his grandfather because ventolin was only invented in the 1960s.

I worry about the shit they're spraying in the atmosphere right now. I can see it every day

What do you mean?

user9876. Maybe due to lack of exposure to different things. Similar to how hayfever is more common in people who weren’t exposed to a variety of pollens as a child.

I think there is some truth in this. I remember having hayfever as a child for about 3 summers. My cruel parents made me walk through the fields almost every day and only giving me medication at bedtime, so I could sleep. It did go eventually, but not sure if it was because of exposure or just growing out of it. None of my children have any allergies.

Then I found I can't eat a wide variety of fruits, nuts and vegetables. And I mean properly allergic!! I have wondered what is going on with food. People can't suddenly have changed!!

Our diets have changed vastly over the last 50 years or so.

Did people die years ago of allergies? I can't remember one single person in my class who had an allergy (70s)

But what did you and your classmates eat? Peanut butter was a novelty not an everyday food, nuts arrived in a net in December and you had to take your life in our hands with a hammer on the kitchen floor to get at them.

Genetic in our families case.

As for being too clean, its not that . to understand the hygiene theory you need to grasp what you need to do to protect your kids from allergies.

basically expose them to animals and their waste. cows are particularly good.
But, there is a catch, have close exposure to cows and their poop BEFORE you get preggers, and during and after birth take infant near cows and their poop to fully get the protective impact to stop allergies developing.

oh, and bear in mind not all farm animals give that good a protection, asthma is pretty high in pig farmers. this may of course be the result of us living closely with pigs during the middle ages. or when early farming started.

so its not a case of keeping your kids or home overly clean.

As the mother of four, and two with severe allergies i get rather fed up of being blamed for being too clean with my filthy brood.

Exclusion during pregnancy and in early years has been proved to cause some food allergies, peanut in particular. certainly the old advice to avoid during pregnancy lead to a huge increase in peanut allergy in non atopic families.

If you are wondering if your kids are likely to develop allergies, if you the mother have atopic diseases, asthma, hay fever, eczema risk higher. if its just dad, its a bit lower. both well... more likely.
But take heart, both me and hubby have atopic disease and only 2 out of my 4 live with it.

I often hear the equally annoying rubbish about 'chemicals' or 'vaccination' being a cause. Crap in my view and even if the latter was slightly likely am so glad my kids are protected from diseases that would have severely damaged or killed them. I have family members who live with damage from such diseases, like rubella and whooping cough. All of which are far worse imo than severe, life threatening food allergy.

Not sure. But I don’t remember but allergy being a thing at all growing up (80s/90s). Now it really is.

Apparently our houses are too clean, though sometimes it's because we introduce foods to our diets from other parts of the world, our bodies can't change in just a generation or too eg some ethnic groups are more sensitive to dairy.

My dd is allergic to certain sweets, easily avoided. Otherwise we are ok, probably on account of my hatred of housework and that I don't use chemical cleaners

Did people die years ago of allergies? I can't remember one single person in my class who had an allergy (70s)

I had a friend who was coeliac in the 70's, we thought it was really odd, she brought her own food to parties.

3 kids, 3 caesarians, all bottle fed and no allergies..

I think there have always been allergies. I honestly don’t think it’s any different.

I have a child with many allergies. The amount of people aged 60+ that talk to me about their children who couldn’t drink milk/were sick when they ate eggs/couldn’t have bread is amazing.

One lady in her 80’s was talking about how she gave her son or orange juice instead of milk as a baby because milk made him sick and that now she realises that he must have been allergic.

I know a lot of adults who have realised that dairy/gluten has always made them ill and it’s not until they’ve connected it as adults that they are suddenly better.

When you have a child with allergies yourself, everyone shares their own stories and there are an amazing amount. People are also embarrassed to say they are allergic to something if they aren’t anaphylactic as it’s seen as such a faddy thing now. It’s not until you share your own story that they know you won’t mock them.

Nothing's proven. I agree with a pp that diagnosis is probably better now and children today recognised as having mild or moderate allergies would in past times have just been "sickly" as their parents kept unknowingly feeding the child what was making them ill. (While those with serious allergies would simply have died).

The hygiene hypothesis makes sense but is unproven. We know some specific allergies can be caused by continued exposure to the allergen. Environmental pollutants may be a factor but nothing's proven there either.

People are coming out with some seriously dodgy 'facts' on here

No people did not die of allergies. Even hayfever was fairly uncommon when I was young.

Lack of exposure to germs and increased city living. I had a conversation with a Malawian pediatrician once who said that allergies are very much a first world country problem, as children are so fervently protected from anything remotely germy. His doctoral thesis was that a baby who has been in a sling whilst his/her mother milked cows is never going to grow up with a dairy allergy. And so on.

To the user who said how can you not be exposed to a variety of pollens. By growing up in a city and spending a lot of time indoors as a child.

You can’t teally be exposed to a variety of pollens unless you travel or move round a lot. I spent a lot of time outdoors in the area in which I lived, and developed hay fever at 30 after moving to an area 70 miles away where the crops/ plants/ pollen was different.

A nurse at work was telling me yesterday that she believes it's because of vaccination. She never had her children vaccinated.
Five minutes later I queued up for my flu jab, which I get to protect my severely asthmatic child (other two have no allergies or asthma) from flu I may otherwise bring home from work.
No idea which of us is right, probably neither. I can see her argument, but I have three children who I breastfed, birthed, vaccinated... Two have no allergies or atopic conditions but two of my sisters do.

A nurse at work was telling me yesterday that she believes it's because of vaccination. She never had her children vaccinated

The ignorance of some people is truly astounding. That nurse should be struck off.

I found out that one of the countries with the lowest percentage of people with peanut allergy is Israel. One of the theories is that one of the first snacks many weaning babies are give are like wotsits but coated in peanut powder. They melt in the mouth so are easy for babies to eat.

If this is true, I wonder if some allergies are caused by lack of early exposure?

I do agree that I knew of very few kids with allergies growing up in the 60s but thInk as posters have said, there was little awareness. My DB is autistic (not an allergy Obviously) but being born in the 50s it wasn’t known of and he was labelled a ‘naughty’ child with some weird behaviours . My DF had severe eczema but don’t think a link was made between that and possible causes. It was put down to ‘nerves’. There were kids labelled ‘chesty’ who maybe had asthma and how many failure to thrive cases might have been coeliac or other food allergies.

You don't have to go far back to a time when very few children were affected by allergies. In the 50s, some had excema, a few with hay-fever, but nut allergies were extremely rare. It is a recent phenomenon.

Some researchers think there were fewer allergic reactions with earlier weaning and it helps to introduce a variety of foods, including eggs, peanut butter and honey, in small quantities, sooner than 6 months. Scrambled eggs were recommended as a first weaning food at 4 months. My DiL had no problems with hay fever as a child in NZ. She moved here as an adult, new varieties of pollen, and now is severely affected.

There's certainly a LOT more asthma, but I think that's air pollution. My dcs were brought up when no one thought twice about smoking in the house. I had a home-birth with one of them and even the midwife was happily puffing away in the same room as the baby. But none of them had even so much as bronchitis with a cold. Two of my grandchildren have been hospitalised with bronchiolitis, which I'd never heard of till then.

There's probably no single cause, but the extent of it is definitely new.

I think most children with severe allergies would have died young or become sickly. I am sure coeliac disease was known as weaning disease or something similar. Others would have been thought to choke rather than suffocate.

I suspect there is a genetic link so previously children with severe allergies will have died they now grow into adults who have their own children with allergies. Possibly.

I read they've increased rapidly since advice to give solids later was introduced.

abacucat loads of people including me had hayfever when I was young and I am in my 60s now. I also had allergic reactions to sunlight as a child which, thankfully, I don't get now. My best friend at school had asthma which, without ventolin, was really debilitating - she never did PE. My dad, who would now be 93 was allergic to penicillin.

It's nonsense to say nobody had allergies in the past.