Is it me or have the number of children with allergies got worse....

[spiralqueen]

...since pregnant women started being told to restrict their diets and avoid certain foods?

another whooping cough

very briefly a hypothesis about aluminium which is in many vaccines

I have to go and do other things.

-- but think about it: the increase in auto immune disease mirrors the development in the vaccination schedule.

Correlation may not equal causation when it comes to football and bananas but we are talking about an immune system problem and an immune system trauma.

We ferret around thinking could it be that we should have died in the olden days? could it be my Vim? and yet we ignore the massive insult to an undeveloped immune system that almost every child undergoes.

We know too that if you have measles you are less likely to have asthma: in fact one of the "establishment" explanations, the hygiene hypothesis, makes that link between disease and atopy.

This is not a suggestion that all allergies and atopic reactions can be put down to vaccinations. Of course that is not true.

I think it would be foolish to ignore however the role they must play.

Thanks, stuffitllama, I'll have a read after I put DD to bed (I'm meant to be working, but this looks more interesting).

it shouldn't take long, they are brief abstracts

there is a lot more but I hesitate to post from anti-vaccine or alternative websites as the sources could discount it from consideration for you

My Ds's allergies presented themselves before he had any vaccinations, so not that cause in his case.

It's bizarre isn't it peeingmyselflaughing. I would give anything for my DS to be able to eat normally, wy do people feel the need to be competetive about something so bizarre?

One theory I came across was that children born by cs are more likely to have allergies as they don't pick up the good bacteria from their mothers via the birthing canal.

Also that allergic children may have a gut problem due to bacteria levels which may be the cause of their allergies.

Obviously, I'm hopeful that something may help ds2 so I'm trying probiotics with him to 'correct' his gut.

The CS theory rings true with me as DS was an emergency CS - but even so, there are so many CS births and I think there still needs to be a pre-existing tendency to allergy which is then triggered, otherwise all/most CS babies would have allergies.

Definitely a plausible link though in my opinion.

My allergic child was a vaginal delivery and breastfed but I was on antibiotics which would have killed all our good bacteria. He also had a vomiting bug shortly before he was weaned which wouldn't have helped his gut. My 3rd dc was a c/s so I was on an antibiotic drip for that after carefully taking probiotics for months whilst pg. He was given antibiotics soon after he was born as he was mistakenly thought to have a high white cell count. I will be giving him probiotics for a couple of months before weaning him.

It's so difficult to gauge though isn't it? This is why I'm desperate to read some studies into allergy (thanks stuffitllama). Problem is I don't understand all the science-y bits; I need someone to interpret them for me. And, like Riven points out, can testing animal allergic responses help?

Anecdotal alert...there's a lot of allergy in my family, my mother craved Brazil nuts when pregnant with me and I was weaned at 8 weeks. Wonder if any of those factors contributed to my nut allergy, asthma, eczema, hayfever? Or was it 'just' genetics?

Still, I don't believe in testing on animals either. Apart from the ethical aspect, Riven's right, what on earth does their biology have to do with that of humans'?

Some zoologist/biologist/doctor is going to come and tell me now...

Probably...