Nutty Notions

Sorry for the cutesy title, but I just had a jam-packed weekend celebrating the Spawn's first birthday with an insane number of family and friends. As a result, my brain is gelatinizing (picture the new Alec Baldwin commercial) - or maybe in the process of de-gelatinizing.

The Spawn's first birthday was a bit more challenging than most because he's an allergy baby. Yeah, I know - an immunologist with an allergy baby. Life is just filled with little ironies. Right now he can't eat milk, soy, egg, sesame or peanut. We have to carry around an epipen with us at all times. I go for shock value when he visits someone's house without me. My spiel - "This is how you use the epipen. He's never had a serious problem, but it's better to know how to use it and not have to than to not know how to use it and have a dead baby". I always make sure to say 'dead baby', because the shock value alone makes people pay attention.

Poor guy - fortunately he doesn't know what he's missing. I had no problem finding a decent vegan cake, but let me tell you how disgusting allergy-free frosting is. I tried making it with lard (not so appealling to a vegetarian) and buying an allergy-free frosting at the store. Both were shiny, hard, and not overly tasty (judging by the yucky face).

But onto the point of my blog for the day. Kids often outgrow milk, soy, egg, and sesame, but only 20% of kids ougrow peanut allergies. Unfortunately, peanut allergies are the most insidious and scary of the lot. There's positive news out of Mt. Sinai though. In a paper published in the Feb 2009 issue of J Allergy Clin Immunol, a group led by Dr. Xiu-Min Li found that long-term anaphylaxis protection was observed in mice treated with a combination Chinese herbal remedy - FAHF-2. Through unknown mechanism, it skews the peanut allergen immune response from Th2 to Th1 (could this also be a new adjuvant?).

This drug is currently in phase I trials for safety and dosage (results should be available by the end of 2009), but the safety data is promising because of its long term use in herbal medicine.
For those who scoff at herbal medicine, aspirin was originally an herbal medicine (from willow) as was penicillin (mold). While most herbal remedies are probably crap, we shouldn't scorn natural or traditional sources for potential new drug therapies.

Mouse success and human success are very different things (even I can cure cancer in mice), but this therapy is definitely something to watch if you're a parent of a kid with allergies.

Abstract:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WH4-4VJKVPP-X&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=6eea32664dfdbf3fbf11c5577ffa6414