In the next few years, you might be able to wolf down a whole bag of peanuts and step out in any climate even if you suffer from allergies or asthma, experts have revealed at the British Association Festival of Science in Norwich.
A leading expert, Dr Ronald van Ree of Amsterdam University, said that a vaccine without side effects was being developed to help those who are unable to do a lot of things because they were allergic to substances or suffered from asthma. Asserting that the claim was not 'science fiction', but 'realistic', Dr Ree said the development of anti-allergy pills and injections are on. Such cures are more than welcome considering that the prevalence of asthma has gone up 100 per cent in the last two decades, with hay fever and severe allergic reactions posting an upward trend. As many as 3,000 people in the UK are hospitalized with severe allergic reactions annually, with 20 having succumbed to the health ill in 2005.
About 30 per cent of adults and 40 per cent of children in UK suffer from allergies to some substance or the other, the Royal College of Physicians said, adding that food allergies like those related to peanuts were on the rise. In 1996, one in 200 children was allergic to peanuts, which has now increased to one in 50. “At present the only treatment for food allergy is avoidance and rescue medication. Avoidance is difficult and sometimes even impossible. The one thing we really need for food allergy patients is a treatment that can cure the disease,” Dr Ree said.
According to him, scientists are scrutinizing the possibility of using genetic engineering to render the proteins that cause allergic reactions ineffective. The drugs developed through these techniques will work on the immune system to make it stronger to fight allergies. It is also possible that scientists will modify the protein in the allergenic foods to develop other variants of foods that do not cause allergies.
They are also using weaker variants of the allergenic proteins to develop anti-allergy medicines. “This allows scientists to develop hypo-allergenic variants of these molecules for application in safer immunotherapy that will induce little or no side effects,” Dr Ree said. Some of the foods that are known to cause severe allergies are eggs, fish, milk, peanuts, wheat, and nuts like almonds, hazelnuts, cashew and others.
Dr Ree said that cures for food allergies are likely to hit the market in the next seven to 10 years. “Taken together, these new developments provide good opportunities to develop strategies for the treatment of food allergies, both preventive and curative. Effective treatment will end the fear that food-allergic patients have for unwanted exposure to food allergens,” he said.
Given that the UK has the highest prevalence of allergies in Europe, the news of solutions for them is a boost for health workers.
“Many people with asthma have allergies. Ninety per cent of people with asthma say dust triggers their asthma and 79 per cent tell us their symptoms are triggered by pollen. Therefore, the development of successful vaccines against allergies would be welcome,” a spokesman for Asthma UK, an asthma support charity, said. Agreed Anaphylaxis Campaign's David Reading. “Food allergy, in particular, is potentially life-threatening and is a total nightmare for many people. Imagine the burden on a family if a child is rushed to Casualty in a really bad way after having a life-threatening-reaction,” he said.
