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I just wanna stop for a moment and say I really appreciate all the hard work you're doing.
Its really not the easiest to find news stories that are sincerely really good news, and not just a slight letup of something awful.
Your posts make my timeline a much nicer place and I really appreciate it ❤️
Glad I was able to make somebody's day better
How? Where did they go? What caused it to spike in the first place?
Evidence shows that early exposure to potential allergies reduces the likelihood of getting that allergy. Since we've know this doctors have recommended early exposure to allergens, instead of avoiding them. Now that we no longer avoid peanuts before adolescence, the allergy is receding.
adolescence
I assume you meant infancy?
Changed, in to "before", iirc this impact persists a little past infancy, but yes not into the teens, I just was not thinking about my words.
The article is paywalled but the gist is in the tagline: people kept peanuts but babies for fear of allergies but lack of exposure leads to allergies.
I've been casually following this for awhile so here's some further insight: peanut allergies were on the rise worldwide except in one place...Israel.
Have you ever seen those "puffs" baby snacks? They're like Cheeto Puffs but made for babies. Easier to eat with a weaker flavor. They're popular across the world but there's a brand with a peanut variety that sells particularly well in Israeli.
After realizing the connection, they started studying it. I am assuming this article is the conclusion of that study.
a landmark trial in 2015 found that feeding peanuts to babies could cut their chances of developing an allergy by over 80 percent. In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines.
The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place — dropping to 0.93 percent between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46 percent between 2012 and 2015. That’s a 36 percent reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43 percent drop in peanut allergies.
Can't argue with those results. Thank God.
This is unsurprising to anyone aware how the peanut allergies blew up.
Medical guidelines organizations issued a pediatric guideline contrary to known science that wasn't evidence-based, then later course-corrected[^delay]: they fixed their fuck up.
It’s pretty well known by the evidence-based medicine community.
So, this isn't some miraculous achievement: it's the correction of a self-inflicted setback.
It's surprising those organizations haven't been sued into oblivion over this.
[^delay]: but only after significant delays when they could no longer deny their fuck up
That is interesting. I have wondered before why I regularly heard and read about peanut allergies in US media and US Internet forums when I've never actually encountered anyone with one here (in central Europe). This answers that question...
dos uno💀💀💀
Is this because people who have peanut allergies are now dead?
It is because we are exposing infants to allergens which in turn trains their immune systems to not have the reaction to them. So any reaction other than sever from early, trace, exposure will allow for the child to grow up without the allergic reactions to them, and other allergens, not just peanuts.
early on, before heavy sanitation, people were exposed to more parasites and other microbes than today. apparently parasites modulate the immune system to not attack them, so this has a beneficial effect against AUTOimmune and by extension cancers. i think there is helminthic therapy going on, but i dont think its sanctioned in the medical field. of course it doesnt work with all parasites.(hookworm seems to reduce allergic ashtma). but parasites ascaris worms can trigger it, mainly because the worms travel to the airways and trigger irritation of the lungs.
Well this seems to be more exposure to the allergens themselves, rather than anything to do with parasites. I have heard this before, and I have seen research into how parasites affect your immune system, looking into the possibility that not only can we force functions to fight the parasites properly, but also possibly get into medicine that could modify autoimmune function to not go off the rails, and not react to things that aren't actually some sort of poison.
or because of more awarness and better food safety standards.
But maybe... If we just covered our eyes for one year we'd be done with nut allergies forever. Of course not, but maybe...
Are you Louis C.K?
My shrink told me we didn't even need to feed my son peanut butter, but that one or two small applications of PB to the chest during infancy would reduce the risk of allergy by a massive factor. His mom thought it sounded weird as fuck, but she asked his pediatrician, and then did it. He ain't allergic to peanuts.
it's pseudo-diagnostic, you don't know whether he would have been allergic to peanuts if you didn't rub it on his chest
In a way, yeah. You'd hope that, more than anything, it'd just be a topical reaction on their skin.
My youngest had real bad skin as a baby that cleared up when we stopped feeding our oldest peanut butter. We had him get a scratch test and it showed positive for peanuts back in like Jan 2020.
He was supposed to be getting put into an exposure therapy trial then, but due to COVID we were never able to book a "peanut challenge" exposure test.
Fast forward to about two years ago when they say they have an opening almost a year out for the peanut challenge.
So early this year we finally take it, and he passed. No therapy at all.
We'd been avoiding peanuts like the plague for 5 years. Getting epipens, making sure they are stocked and in-date at preschool. Always carrying one with us. Stressing out about whether or not we left it in the car too long. Never once using it. We were very diligent about peanuts.
The kid was never allergic. He had false positive tests on the scratch test. In fact, the blood tests always showed no reaction. He just had bad skin, or something.
But now he says he doesn't "like" peanut butter and is always still making sure he gets sunbutter...but I know him well enough to know he's actually scared of peanuts and too proud to admit it.
Well yeah, I'm not saying he would have been allergic to peanuts, I'm saying that today's guidance is much better, to the point where the physician I see for another purpose recommended an easy, one time application that we didn't even know was a thing.
So does that mean that this was really a Millenial problem? Cuz I don't think that you heard about this before the early 2000s, maybe the late 90s.
As a late millenial, my guess for the cause of high prevalence of peanut allergy among younger people was because of being less exposed to dirt and being subjected to over-cleanliness when we were growing up. Iirc, the news and medical community overemphasised cleanliness in the 1990s. So, parents overdid it and the children's immune system has become less attuned and familiar to different foreign objects in the body. The immune system then overreacts to non-threatening objects in the body resulting in allergy.
being less exposed to dirt and being subjected to over-cleanliness
I've read talk of this over the years. Anything definitive ever come out? Makes all the sense in thw world to me.
I am not an expert on the topic, but I have learned about this when I was in college. My understanding is that the medical community admit they were wrong about overemphasising cleanliness decades ago and it backfired. Not exposing children to dirt at a healthy dose caused the immune system to overreact leading to allergy and other immune disorder. As someone who was sheltered growing up, that may explain my eczema. I also get hay fever as an adult even though when I wasn't before, when I was younger.
Mid to late 90s was when it started becoming a talked about threat, but 2000s was when we reached "oh my god even a molecule on the hem of someone's clothing is enough to kill 10 people" shit. If you trace backwards that means late Boomers and Gen Xers started, I think, Ziplock parenting a lot - less real play in the dirt, more sit on the couch and eat Dunkaroos.
Basically the last generation that had "be home when the streetlights come on" was the last generation to have the more resilient immune systems, and the two things are probably fairly related.
That's sort of what I had in mind.
It was definitely a thing at school in the 80s.