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Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

bbc.com

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Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> introduce peanut and egg to babies between 4 and 6 months What goes wrong if they're exposed before that? If the mother eats peanuts and eggs while breast feeding, does that confer desensitisation?

I am not sure if you had a child or not, but you don't give the baby food before 4 to 6 months. So its not that you aren't exposing them at all, but not feeding them the food.

There are powders to add to your formula / breast milk to introduce allergens early (we used Ready Set Food but easy to DIY). Kind of annoying since they often clog the nipple of the bottle, but we did it with my daughter who is now 20 months and her favorite breakfast is a spoon of peanut butter. Sesame gives her a slight reaction still, we unfortunately don’t eat it very often.

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#102
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show us any peer reviewed paper ?

I tried searching pubmed but turns out there are a lot of Mana Shahs working in bio research and pharma. The big question for me is whether this is a permanent fix or if you have to keep taking their tablets (at $99-ish a month, it looks like?) Unfortunately this doesn't look to be covered by my insurance as the at-home test is not administered by a doctor.

My insurance in Germany only accepts peer reviewed stuff anyway so I keep waiting.

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#103
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's the opposite. The advice we were given was that it was very important that their first encounter with the allergens was to eat them, and not to allow skin contact or anything before that. This meant that with my youngest we had no peanuts in the house until she was old enough to eat solid food, and peanut butter was the first food she ate. It's still her favourite food!

> we had no peanuts in the house until she was old enough to eat solid food That seems like overkill. I can't imagine having peanuts or peanut butter in the pantry is going to meaningfully affect a 2 month old infant.

Babies change fast. I can certainly imagine it. You won't know when exactly the flip happens, so you err on the safe side. Also, spread of stuff though the air and by hands: I thought we just spend lockdowns realising that crap spreads far and wide.

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#104
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for being nosy, but did you do oral immunotherapy with or without professional support?

I AM NOT A DOCTOR OR OTHER HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONAL I looked into oral immunotherapy for tree nut allergies. There's a paper from 2022: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/all.15212 They did it in a few stages: 1. First three days: test the child with increasing amounts of cashew protein, until the child has a reaction. Use the amount ingested for that reaction, to determine the single highest tolerated dose (…

>day 1: start with 1/1800th of a small cashew, increasing up to a fifth of a small cashew

do you mean, if there is no reaction to 1/1800th within minutes(?) then try 1/900th, lather rinse repeat?

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#105
Nuts are a very good and healthy natural snack; it's a shame they are banned by most daycares and schools now. It would be great if this became so common they could be allowed again. Without nuts...what do we have instead? Chips. granola-bars. These are highly processed foods that have other issues. Raisins or apples maybe? but they are mostly sugar. None of these options have healthy fat & protein like nuts do. What healthy snacks do you feed your children?

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#106

Nuts are a very good and healthy natural snack; it's a shame they are banned by most daycares and schools now. It would be great if this became so common they could be allowed again. Without nuts...what do we have instead? Chips. granola-bars. These are highly processed foods that have other issues. Raisins or apples maybe? but they are mostly sugar. None of these options have healthy fat & protein like nuts do. What…

Yep, the banning of normal foods from these spaces is a detriment to everyone else. I feel it is a bit unfair, in that everyone else has to “subsidize” the few rare people with allergies. Shouldn’t the burden be on them to avoid public spaces if they’re that sensitive?

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#107

Nuts are a very good and healthy natural snack; it's a shame they are banned by most daycares and schools now. It would be great if this became so common they could be allowed again. Without nuts...what do we have instead? Chips. granola-bars. These are highly processed foods that have other issues. Raisins or apples maybe? but they are mostly sugar. None of these options have healthy fat & protein like nuts do. What…

Yep, the banning of normal foods from these spaces is a detriment to everyone else. I feel it is a bit unfair, in that everyone else has to “subsidize” the few rare people with allergies. Shouldn’t the burden be on them to avoid public spaces if they’re that sensitive?

> Shouldn’t the burden be on them to avoid public spaces if they’re that sensitive?

Depends how emphatic you are to your fellow human being. Peanuts aren't as important in most people's lives as actual people.

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#108
post #60

It is not well known but this also works for adults too. I’m 28 and recently completed oral immunotherapy therapy for my extremely severe peanut allergy. I used to go anaphylactic from single milligram exposure and now I’m eating multiple peanuts a day. As an adult you have to go slower and be more careful but absolutely can be done and is life changing.

How long did your therapy take to get to this point?

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#109
post #94

There is a theory that if your body is not exposed to enough good bacteria and other pathogens then it will build up an army to fight out non important things like pollen and peanuts. I would recommend giving kids probiotics and also not keeping environment so clean with wipes and excessive hand washing that they never get exposed to good and some bad germs.

The grow up eating dirt hypothesis.

Re: Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies

#110

Nuts are a very good and healthy natural snack; it's a shame they are banned by most daycares and schools now. It would be great if this became so common they could be allowed again. Without nuts...what do we have instead? Chips. granola-bars. These are highly processed foods that have other issues. Raisins or apples maybe? but they are mostly sugar. None of these options have healthy fat & protein like nuts do. What…

Yep, the banning of normal foods from these spaces is a detriment to everyone else. I feel it is a bit unfair, in that everyone else has to “subsidize” the few rare people with allergies. Shouldn’t the burden be on them to avoid public spaces if they’re that sensitive?

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