You'd be the best judge of that. How old is she?

We're finding that, with Josh being in college, it's harder to find a 
good time for the challenge (even as a high school upperclassman it 
was hard to find a good time). We have to clear a few days, just in 
case he has some kind of reaction and has to recover (e.g., to get 
through a few days of extreme itchiness, antihistamine grogginess, 
etc., if any of that should come to be).

Even though our kids are atopic and therefore may not "outgrow" all 
that they're allergic to, I have heard of a few cases where, as they 
get older, some of the allergies do lessen or vanish. You can ask 
your allergist what his sense is about a good age to do the oral 
challenges. I'm thinking that 10 or older might be better, or 
possibly during adolescence. Ask.

There have been a few mentions in the popular press recently about an 
approach that uses gradually increasing exposures to small amounts of 
the substance. That approach was derided as charlatanism when Josh 
was young. Of course, that was also the time when mainstream medicine 
claimed emphatically that food allergies had no provable correlation 
to severe atopic dermatitis (eczema). Now they're on record as saying 
that as many as 80% of childhood eczema are associated with food 
allergies(!) I don't know if there have been any recent controlled 
studies that show promising results for this gradual exposure thing. 
body out there been following this? It runs counter to what I've 
learned - that increasing exposure can sensitize. But if there are 
good controlled studies that show good results, it might be worth a 
try. Again, talk to your allergist.

There are other types of challenge that are less risky. When Josh was 
tested for allergy to the flu vaccine (grown in an egg culture), the 
allergist used subcutaneous injections of a series of dilutions of 
the vaccine - from very dilute to full strength - watching for 20 
minutes (?) after each injection for a topical or systemic reaction. 
He did well with that, so we were able to give him the flu shot. 
Since then, he did have an accidental exposure to what we thought 
likely to be eggs and had a pretty severe reaction. So we've been 
hesitant to try the oral challenge. But maybe the right thing to get 
us past our anxiety would be to do the subcutaneous challenge to raw 
egg first. You might want to consider that.

That's all I have for now.

G'Luck,

Mark

At 08:09 PM 1/23/2007, you wrote:
>We are still evaluating our options.
>Should we challenge now?  Should we wait a bit more?  Should we try 
>a different approach?