Peanut allergy on its way out
Peanut allergies may soon be a thing of the past, says Dr. Wesley Burks, a food allergy expert at Duke University Medical Center."I think there's some type of immunotherapy that will be available in five years," reports Burks who says ideally, this therapy would change a person's immune system response to peanuts from an allergic one to a nonallergic one.
This would be great stuff, given that peanut allergies are growing more and more common. And while many kids grow out of other food allergies -- milk and eggs, for example -- only 20 percent ever lose their peanut allergy, which often appears in the first three years of life and manifests itself in range of symptoms, from minor irritation to the whole-body allergic response called anaphylaxis.
Stay tuned for more on peanut immunotherapy. And be on the lookout for news on the genetic engineering front. Burks says genetics may one day produce an allergen-free peanut.
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