Monday, July 16, 2007

Kids' allergy surge baffles researchers

New Australian research has found there is an urgent need for more studies to identify why food allergies in young children are steadily increasing.

An article in the latest Medical Journal of Australia details the research of a Canberra clinical immunologist who has seen a 12-fold increase in the number of children coming to him with allergies from foods like peanuts, egg and milk.

Dr Raymond Mullins says epidemiological studies need to be done to pinpoint the cause of the dramatic increase.

"We have a food allergy tsunami and we're not really equipped to deal with it at this stage," he said.

"We know it is going up, we don't know why. There's lots of theories but most of them don't hold water and we don't have good strategies to prevent it either."

This from ABC News online.

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