Housework is responsible for 10 to 15 per cent of the skin problems that send people to their doctors. Many scrubbing powders contain abrasives – pumice, talc, sand, borax, corn-meal or wood powder – that are dynamite against ground-in oil, grease, tar and other stubborn dirt but also very rough on allergic skin. Seventy to 75 per cent of laundry detergents in the UK contain enzymes, proteins with allergic potential. And practically all laundry soaps contain additives such as sodium carbonate, sodium phosphate, ash, borax or sodium silicate -which may irritate even if they don’t trigger allergy directly. And of course, soaps and detergents contain fragrances, which are just as liable to cause allergy as the scents in cosmetics.

Besides causing allergy directly, soaps and detergents enhance other allergies. These cleansers break down keratin, the tough protein component of skin, and the protective surface oils, therefore speeding up the absorption of allergic chemicals through the skin.

One woman, who has been highly allergic to such substances as pollen, moulds and foods from early childhood, told us that she had been spared the miseries of skin allergies until around 1970, when enzymes became the ‘in’ laundry additives. Her legs broke out in oozing, weeping eczema like rashes. She remains free of the problem, however, as long as she uses only enzyme-free detergents.

You, too, can spare yourself the agonies of allergy to soaps and detergents by following a few simple guidelines.

• Buy only white, unscented soap that’s free of antiseptics, lanolin, enzymes and so forth. Baby soaps and soaps for washable woolens and fine fabrics are the safest.

• In general, simple, basic formulas are less prone to cause reactions than complex ones. Read labels.

• Even the mildest laundry soaps and detergents must be thoroughly rinsed from clothing and bed sheets.

• Pour or measure detergents or bleaches carefully so that they don’t splash on to your hands and arms. Or buy bleach sold in tablet form or packaged in premeasured envelopes.

• During the winter, when dry air makes skin more easily irritated by clothing, presoak laundry and use about half the amount of detergent the manufacturers recommend.

• Remove your rings when washing or using soaps, waxes and polishes to avoid trapping soap next to skin.

• Better yet, use protective gloves to do any kind of housework. For wet jobs, use rubber gloves over powdered cotton gloves to prevent excessive perspiration. To reduce irritation, wear the gloves for thirty minutes at a time rather than pulling them on and off several times in the course of a day. Even with protective gloves, don’t make the scrub water too hot; the heat will penetrate and irritate your hands.

• For dusting or other dry, dirty housework, wear cotton gloves to keep your hands from getting too dirty. That way you don’t have to scrub your hands with soaps to get them clean again.

• Use long-handled brushes as much as possible to keep sensitive skin on arms from being splashed with hot, soapy water or paints, varnishes and lacquers.

Incidentally, the tips suggested above will be helpful whether your skin is allergic or just easily irritated. And they’ll help you tolerate contact with other sources of chemicals besides soaps and detergents.

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Posted by admin on April 7th, 2009 :: Filed under Allergies

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Staying clear of our lively winged assailants isn’t always easy, but there are several steps you can take to minimize the chances that you will tangle with a stinging or biting insect.

How to avoid bee stings

• Stay away from beehives and known nests. Call a beekeeper or the local council if bees choose your immediate environment to form a colony.

• Have wasp and hornet nests removed while they are still small enough to handle.

• Persons allergic to insects should be wary of power mowing, hedge clipping, scything and the like.

• Avoid looking and smelling like a flower during bee-sting season: avoid bright-coloured clothing. Light green, white, tan and khaki are the safest colours. Forswear perfumes and sweet-smelling lotions, creams, shampoos and hairsprays if you plan to be outdoors.

• Don’t wear floppy clothing, and do tie up long hair; both can entangle the stinging insects and anger them into doing their worst.

• Don’t go barefoot or wear sandals – the foot is vulnerable. Stay away from clover patches, flower gardens and other places where bees are busy.

• Keep an insecticide spray in the glove compartment of the car (along with the insect-sting kit) for use if a bee flies in, a very common occurrence.

• If an attack seems imminent, do not swat at the bee or bees and do not flail your arms. Retreat slowly, keep calm and make no sudden movement. If retreat is impossible, lie down and cover your head with your arms.

• Be wary of litter bins and rotting fruit under trees -favorite attractions for bees and wasps.

• Discourage allergic youngsters from eating sweets, ice cream cones and drinking soft drinks outdoors during warm months. They attract bees, wasps and hornets.

How to avoid ant stings

• Avoid anthills and mounds.

• Keep arms, legs and feet covered since they are the areas most frequently stung.

• Do not leave food uncovered or uncontained within the house, since this is an open invitation to ants.

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Posted by admin on April 7th, 2009 :: Filed under Allergies

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In one of the most comprehensive studies of drug allergy ever conducted – the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program – doctors collected data from patients in ten hospitals in the United States, plus eight foreign hospitals, covering 22,227 people in all. The results show which drugs most often cause skin reactions (itching, rashes, hives and so on). It’s important to note that women reacted 50 per cent more frequently than men, and that the severity of a person’s illness had no bearing on how likely he or she was to react.

Penicillin. This is not one drug but a general name for a group of antibiotics. Different types of penicillin, made from special moulds, control specific types of bacterial infections -making penicillins the most useful and widely prescribed drugs in the world. Doctors find, however, that from 1 to 10 per cent of the population is allergic to penicillin. Fortunately, most reactions are mild. The chance of a dramatic, explosive reaction is relatively remote; the odds are somewhere between 1 and 4 in 10,000. Even then, only 2 in 100,000 of these result in death. The remainders are kept in check by emergency medical action. (Strangely enough, people who are allergic to penicillin moulds, such as those sometimes found in cheese or around the house, can generally tolerate penicillin.)

Doctors have begun to realize that many people who think they’re allergic to penicillin aren’t really allergic to it after all. Penicillin allergy, it seems, often fades with time if the drug is avoided. Researchers at the Clinical Research Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, tested 300 children who were reputedly allergic to penicillin, to find that only 19 per cent were indeed allergic. The authors conclude that the incidence of penicillin allergy is over-estimated, and that the allergy is not necessarily permanent.

In a similar study, a team of two doctors and a nurse tested nineteen children who had been judged allergic to penicillin three to five years earlier and found only five were still allergic (Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology).

In still another study, researchers tested almost 800 people presumably allergic to penicillin. Nearly half of them were no longer allergic (Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology).

These studies don’t mean you should throw caution to the wind and disregard any bad experience you may have had with penicillin. On the contrary: it’s important to know if you have an authentic, active allergy to penicillin. Certain conditions – for example, serious infections, a chronic disease such as cystic fibrosis or venereal disease — depend heavily on penicillin for their medical management. In such cases, doctors conduct a skin test with benzylpenicilloyl-polylysine (called Pre-Pen), which they consider to be the most accurate, lowest risk predictor available for penicillin allergy. Sometimes a doctor can manage penicillin allergy by giving stepped doses of penicillin to desensitize an individual to the drug. If using penicillin is out of the question, the doctor will look for a safe substitute.

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Posted by admin on April 7th, 2009 :: Filed under Allergies

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Pesticide spraying is by no means confined to overhead spraying of agricultural crops. Homes, schools, theatres, public buildings and camps are often sprayed – sometimes daily.

In fact, the smorgasbord of household pesticides sitting on the grocery shelf next to the mops and pet foods gives us a false sense of security about their safety. Few people realize they are applying highly toxic chemicals to their environment, so if we’re going to beef about supermarket oranges blitzed with malathion, we shouldn’t use pesticides in our own backyards and kitchen cupboards, either.

Exotic, six-syllable chemicals aren’t the only pesticides that can cause trouble. Many household insecticides contain pyrethrum, a perfectly natural product made from the flower of a plant related to ragweed. If you’re allergic to ragweed, you’re apt to be allergic to pyrethrum, too. All of which prompts Dr Randolph to warn, ‘Never, never use a pesticide indoors.’

If it comes down to either having the termites in your house exterminated or waiting for the timbers to crash down around you, ask the exterminator to apply the chemicals directly to the nest rather than zapping the entire house. If the firm won’t do that, find one that will. And have any extermination done right before you go on holiday so fumes have a chance to lie down while you’re away.

You may even be able to escape overhead spraying outdoors. A woman in Texas who is extremely sensitive to chemicals tells us: ‘The little town I live in fogs for mosquitoes. I was hit with the fumes six times before I finally convinced them that they had to call me before they started fogging. I told them that if they hit me again, they might as well not send an ambulance they should send the hearse instead. Now they have a sign on the fogger that says “Do not remove this machine from the garage without calling Mrs Scherzer.”

‘This year,’ she continued, ‘the town itself wasn’t spraying, but the county was. And the county man would come around and knock on my door at nine a.m. and say, “We’re going to fog this area at six o’clock this evening.” That would give me enough time to leave town. I’d spend a couple of days with my daughter or mother-in-law until the stuff got out of the air.’

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Posted by admin on April 7th, 2009 :: Filed under Allergies

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Sooner or later, you’re going to eat something you shouldn’t — largely because eating is not only a nutritional duty but a social and aesthetic experience. Dinners are shared in other people’s homes. Birthdays and anniversaries are celebrated in restaurants. So are business lunches, even family get-togethers. (We won’t even mention holidays!) Few people have 100 per cent control over their diet all the time. Besides, nobody likes to be a killjoy. So you eat the cheese dip or chicken croquettes and hope for the best. Thankfully, there are a few emergency measures you can use to undo your errors. An ice pack will take the sting out of the hot and pounding lip discomfort of a food reaction. For more generalized symptoms, you can force yourself to vomit recently eaten food by sticking your fingers down your throat. Sounds unpleasant, we know. But quick and lasting relief is worth a few seconds of discomfort, and several doctors we interviewed suggest the technique. If you prefer, you can take a cathartic like plain milk of magnesia instead, to help nudge food through the intestines more rapidly.

Doctors also tell us that a solution of mineral salts – such as plain old baking soda diluted in plenty of water – seems to help neutralize the effects of an allergic food, nipping an adverse reaction in the bud. For people watching their sodium intake, potassium bicarbonate alone is a better alternative. It’s available at most chemists.

Mineral salts are all right in a pinch – before a dinner party or other occasion where what you eat is beyond your control, or as an after-dinner bromide. Don’t make a daily habit of mineral salts or cathartics, though – they’re strictly emergency outs, to help you cope with inadvertent violations. Avoidance is still the name of the game.

Allergy doctors who prescribe the Rotary Diet encourage people with food allergies to follow the four-day plan for life, speaking well of its ability both to relieve existing food allergies and prevent future problems. (Not to mention the fact that allergy injections have a poor track record for removing problems.) Invariably, compliance comes down to two things: how allergic you are, and how essential is the offending food to your diet. If you get giant hives or splitting headaches from wheat, you’ll need little encouragement to avoid it completely. But if you feel only slight fatigue or a little depressed, you’ll probably be inclined to risk minor discomforts for the convenience of eating wheat. You really owe it to yourself to rotate, though -or to encourage your child to rotate.

We’re not so naive as to suggest that sticking to a Rotary Diet is always easy. Few people, after all, have the patience and perseverance to deal with a rigid schedule of permitted and forbidden foods with no let-up for months on end. Doctors know that, too. Kendall Gerdes, an allergist in Denver, Colorado, told us that some people are able to return to their customary eating habits as long as they periodically return to a Rotary Diet long enough to build up their resistance to troublesome foods. ‘Three months down the line,’ says Dr Gerdes, ‘I want them to go back on a Rotary Diet for three cycles to reestablish their tolerance.’

Leniency of that sort helps enormously when you’re trying to get your allergic child to stick to a Rotary Diet – although Dr Boxer told us that he found some kids are often surprisingly cooperative about food rotation. ‘We’ve got a lot of kids who are great about it,’ he told us. ‘They’ll say, “No, thanks, this isn’t my day to eat that food.” In some ways, children may find a Rotary Diet easier to follow than adults, since it all seems like a game. And they don’t have twenty or thirty years of entrenched eating habits to change.

But childhood is dotted with enough important social events like birthday parties and school festivities to tempt even the most self-disciplined child. On special occasions, it’s probably wiser to allow children to eat forbidden food and to have them feel they are different or less healthy than their friends – unless they’re going to get severely ill.

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Posted by admin on April 7th, 2009 :: Filed under Allergies

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