For all of my allergic-panicked parent brethren, check out this Yahoo news article on hope for peanut allergy sufferers.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090315/ap_on_he_me/med_peanut_allergy

I have the (likely false) egomania that because I'm a scientist, an IMMUNOLOGIST, I should be able to cure the Spawn's food allergies. The problem, of course, is that I've done my work primarily in mice, and mice don't get food allergies (at least they don't on rodent diet). To model food allergy in mice, you have to inject them with an allergen, along with some sort of stimulating adjuvant (I wonder if it works like this in humans too and we don't know it). Of course, the human population is a lot more genetically variable than inbred strains of mice, so we'd be much more likely to see variability in the extremes of immune system function, but my opinions on the limitations of using inbred mouse models of human disease deserves its own series of posts.

The concept of tolerization has been around for a long time. This is the basis for "allergy vaccines". You provide your immune system with small, but increasingly larger, doses of allergen until it recognizes the allergen as non-threatening (to simplify to the point where even the Spawn would understand what I'm saying) and shuts off the immune response. This is commonly used for certain environmental allergens, but has been avoided for food allergens due to 1) their potential severity 2) their inpredictability and most importantly 3) the fact that it doesn't work. The mucosal/oral/intestinal immune response is distinctly different from other types of immune response, and much more poorly studied. Only recently has mucosal immunity even received it's own subgrouping at major immunology conferences. Therefore, it's no surprise that food allergen tolerization has been a failure - we don't understand enough about the underlying biology to tolerize properly.

Enter the new clinical study out of NC and Arkansas. They slow induce tolerance with incredibly small (<1/1000 peanut) but increasing oral doses of peanut flour until kids can eat the equivalent of 15 peanuts without a reaction (hard to imagine accidentally eating 15 peanuts). The real kicker with this study is that once the therapy is stopped, some of the kids were still tolerant 2 years down the line. Me, I'd rather take a daily peanut flour dose than risk a surprise anaphylactic reaction with no epipen, but I guess I'm just conservative. This therapy could enter clinical practice in 2-3 years (just when the Spawn is old enough to give it a try).

Anyway, the study is well done and gives me hope that the Spawn won't have to be a bubble boy, never going on adventurous vacations b/c of the lack of nearby hospital and having an embarrassing Mom always explain the use of the epipen to prevent "Dead Kid" to friends' parents and teachers. The counter-culture attack on allergy-kids ("it's just crazy over-protective parents, there's nothing wrong with the kids") will make managing dangerous food allergies even more difficult, and so I hope this tolerization therapy actually takes.