What is an allergy? How do we get them? When allergies were first discovered by Clemson von Pirquet, they weren’t very common, but the amount of people that have allergies now are growing rapidly every year. There are two main hypothesis that people have proposed for why this is happening. One is that humans now are so clean that children’s environments are germ free and their immune systems don’t fully develop and become strong. The second is that chemicals from truck exhaust, rubber, pesticides or cleaning compounds are making our immune system go haywire.
The idea of an "allergy" was introduced in 1906 by the Austrian pediatrician Clemens von Pirquet. He came to this discovery after he said that some of his patients were reacting in abnormal ways to innocuous entities such as pollen, certain foods, or dust. He named this reaction in a person’s immune system an allergy.
Today, one out of every 13 kids in the US has an allergy and I happen to be one of them. Sometimes being allergic to the weirdest thing, sesame, can be embarrassing when explaining to others. “It’s a life threatening allergy”, I find myself saying. But I have had many allergic reactions and I’m still alive, so maybe its not that bad. Having allergies have taught me how to take care of myself and become independent. One summer, two years ago, I decided I would take a risk and try to out grow my allergy. Everyday I would have a bite of an sesame cracker and everyday I would take a little bit bigger piece. My immune system was growing stronger and stronger, but eventually, I stopped. I didn’t really care for the taste of the cracker and I had assumed that my immune system wouldn’t get worse. I was wrong, I hadn’t fully gotten rid of the allergy and it came back after a while.
Many scientist are doing experiments on allergies and how to help children outgrow them. I recently read an article in the Oregonian about how scientist are giving children with peanut allergies small amounts of peanut protein powder everyday and eventually their reactions are going away. Hopefully, someday this form of testing will be very common and less people will have allergies.
Sources:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17136331