allergies (Page 2)

People with peanut allergies risk their lives getting on airplanes where snacks are passed out. Kids are in danger if they go to a friend’s house that has peanut butter in the cupboard. But this may all change soon, due to a new medicine which will allow them to eat almost 9 peanuts without an allergic reaction. Right now, people with severe allergies can only eat about half a peanut. The drug won’t allow them to eat as many as they want, but it will protect them if they unknowingly eat something containing them.
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A 60-year-old Australian man received a liver transplant from a 15-year-old boy who died of anaphylactic shock after eating a peanut. Now the organ recipient has also developed a life-threatening allergy to nuts. Despite having no history of nut allergy, he had a dangerous reaction to a cashew nut 25 days after receiving the transplant. None of the other people who received donated organs from the same teenager developed nut allergies.

Immunologist Tri Giang Phan says there has only been one recorded case of a nut allergy being transferred by organ transplantation before, in France in 1997, when a patient received both a liver and a kidney from the same donor.
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Rising carbon dioxide levels associated with global warming could lead to an increase in allergies to ragweed and other plants by mid-century, according to Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School. His study found that ragweed grown in an atmosphere with double the current carbon dioxide levels produced 61 percent more pollen than normal. A doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is expected to occur between 2050 and 2100.
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