'Allergic to everything' channel 4 thursday

[misdee]

see here

Allergy is spreading throughout the population at an alarming rate. At present, one in four British people suffer from an allergy, or have done at some time in their lives. Each year, the number of UK allergy sufferers increases by five per cent. Forty per cent of children now suffer from asthma, eczema or hay fever, and more than one million people have a food allergy.

© Ronnie Bergeron
The difficulties of living with an allergy are highlighted in Channel 4's Allergic to Everything, which follows four families whose lives have been blighted by allergies. Liz is 21 and suddenly became severely allergic to a whole range of foodstuffs as well as latex, pollen and grass, at the age of nineteen. Ewan's mother has been advised to keep him off all artificial flavours and colours, which is no easy task with an eight-year-old. Georgia is four years old and suffers from asthma, eczema and a severe skin allergy which means that her legs need to be bandaged to stop her itching. And James is just five months old but has a bleeding rash all over his body.

Chandra

We saw Jackie Norton in Hartbury, Gloucestershire - she works/owns Prestberries Farm in Hartbury

• she is semi-retired and Senior Kneisologist (if you can call them that?) so much so that she trains other Knesiologists - I can give you her telephone number if you would like, as she would be able to recommend someone nearer to you

Chandra

Sorry should have added number

01452 700306

Thanks FIMAC

the anaphylaxis campaign ran a campaign last year to try and improve allergy services. That probably gave the programme makers the idea for the programme. If you don't wish to join the campaign e-mail them and ask them to keep you informed of any future campaign. I was one of the people who wrote to the select committee looking at this last year. Also write to your MP as personal letters really do make more difference than petitions.

As Chandra said gps can take blood and send it off for a RAST test if you have a reasonable idea of what the allergen(s) are. It has some drawbacks, mainly that not all reactions are IgE mediated and it only tests IgE levels. However it would have been ideal for the 8 year old boy on the programme who had tested positive in the past but had outgrown their allergies. I felt so angry that no-one had mentioned the possibility to the mums of that child and the one whose eczema was due to milk allergy.

The government's defense about our lousy allergy services is that we have consultants "with an interest" who also do allergy testing. Unfortunately they aren't always as clued up as a proper consultant and it can still take years to get to see one of them. Financial arguments work best with governments so pointing out how much the NHS is wasting on creams for child with eczema is a very good tactic.

Great Ormond Street have Doctors practicisng alternative Chinese medicine for the cases of eczema that conventional medicine fails to cure -Chineses medicine believes that it is an imbalance and the effects of the imbalance is the 'heat' from the eczema (imho) Has anyone thought of trying this?

When we lived the the States there was a % given (I think it was 80%?) of all eczema and asthma is caused by allegies - esp Cows milk. If you child was suffering with either (even mildly) they would undergo allery testing

We tried the Chinese Trad Medicine doctor that worked with GOSH, she has had lots of success with children and eczema. Unfortunately it didnt work for ds. In fact, as we were told to stop the steroids while the treatment took place, his eczema got very bad very quickly to a point where the hospital wanted to admit him and sedate him for a week .

tatt, do you have a copy of the letter you sent? I'll definately write to my mp but a rough outline of a letter to copy would be brill.

bunny2 it was a very personal letter because that's what the campaign asked for - personal experiences of allergy services. I'd suggest you wrote along the lines of

I am writing to express my concern about the extremely poor allergy services in this country. As you are probably aware Britain has high, and increasing, levels of allergy yet we have far fewer allergy consultants than other European countries. We do also have consultants "with an interest in " allergy but they are not as well informed and it can still take many months even to obtain this lower standard of service.

My own experience of the allergy services comes from (having a child who had to be admitted to hospital for adrenaline, severe eczema, whatever you want to say here). Talk about things like how long you had to wait, how you were driven to pay for treatment, how much the NHS spent on treating your child's symptoms.

I had a special moan about the lack of information available to adults who develop allergies. If I'd know about probiotics reducing the risk maybe my kids wouldn't have allergies.