Re: Outgrowing allergies

Many kids may well outgrow dairy allergies ... but please don't count on it,
and stay very alert if you ever reintroduce milk. 

I was allergic to dairy from birth. When I was about 2-3 years old, my
reactions to dairy changed, and my mother thought I'd outgrown the allergy.
She put milk back in my diet. I kept showing the changed symptoms, but they
weren't the same as my infant response to dairy, so no one thought they were
had anything to do with milk. 

Thus began more than two and a half decades of trying to identify the cause
of all my "mysterious" health problems. Finally, after a doctor kept
insisting we remove my (perfectly healthy) gall bladder, my partner wondered
if dairy could be causing "some" of my problems, and we tried eliminating
dairy products from my diet. Wow, what a difference! All my health problems
disappeared--literally all of them! We were amazed. What was this?

We moved shortly after that to a different state and a different medical
culture, and not long after the move, a RAST test (blood test) confirmed
that my dairy allergy was still quite present. The downside, though, was
that after eliminating constant exposure to dairy and getting much healthier
as a result, accidental dairy exposure caused *much* worse reactions ... and
the reactions got more severe as the years went by. Today, the tiniest bit
of cross-contamination in my food or medicine causes anaphylaxis--as does
inhaling dairy-laden dust from other people's snack foods (like Doritos,
etc.) or breathing air laced with hot cheese particles. I've had enough
life-threatening reactions to have lost count.

We speculate that, if dairy had never been reintroduced to my diet when I
was a young child, I might have retained the dairy allergy with its changed
responses anyway ... but it's quite likely I'd never have developed the
hypersensitive anaphylactic allergy I have now, too.

So, while I'm just a sample size of one, my experiences illustrate how easy
it is to miss a continued allergy when a child's responses to the trigger
change. It's possible for kids to outgrow a dairy allergy, but with any
indication that the allergy exists, I'd opt to keep the child away from
dairy for a very long time before reintroducing at all. Then I'd keep a
comprehensive food and symptom journal for a long time both before and after
reintroducing milk in the doctor's office, and consult closely with a good
allergist before deciding the allergy is gone. Even then, I'd stay alert for
a possible "adult onset" return of the allergy at any time.

Just my two pennies ... hope it helps!

Weavre Cooper

-----Original Message-----
From: Milk/Casein/Lactose-Free List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of MB
Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 10:50 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Allergy testing

Not all children who are truely allergic( anaphylactic) to milk outgrow a 
milk protein allergy.  According to our allergist/pulminologist as they get 
older they usually "tolerate" milk broken down such as "whey" in a baked 
good and by the time they are adults will not react anaphylactically any 
longer to parts of milk that the protein has been broken down such as "whey"

. But even if not anaphylactic(medical emergency) they would still be 
considered allergic and the symptoms will/can manifest themselves 
differently i.e. stomach upset, congestion, eczema etc.....