Hello everyone,

This is my first post to this list. I have been reading it for
a couple of days, and noticed that I already knew some of you
(Robyn Kozierok and Kathy Wentz) from other allergy-related lists.
I think this list may be of great interest to most of us and hope
that the moderators will keep us free of the flaming and spam that
unfortunately I am starting to notice here.

I have a 1 year old son severely allergic (anaphilactic) to cow's
milk proteins (casein, lactoalbumin and lactoglobulin) He tested
RAST positive to the three of them in two ocassions. I did breastfeed
him for 6 months, and never encountered any problems at all even
though I used to have regular amounts of diary at that time. When
I gave him his first bottle he had an anaphylactic shock :-( and
since then he has been on Pregomin, a hipoallergenic non-milk based
formula which is OK although it tastes awfully. Unfortunately I
followed some bad advice and stopped breastfeeding then as I had
to go back to work and was concerned that my milk could harm him
anyway.

Now my questions: 1) I had always thought that cow's milk proteins
were structuraly different from human's, (I mean that bovin casein
was different from human casein) but from what I have read here lately
that seems to be wrong. Than how do you explain that my son is allergic
to lactoglobulin which is found in bigger amounts in human milk than
cow's milk and yet he was doing OK while breastfed?

2) I belong to the Spanish Association of Parents of Allergic Children
and have to write an article on how to cope with your child's allergies
(i.e. at school, while traveling, etc.) for our bulletin. Do you know
of any on-line sources of information I could refer to? Or do you have
any suggestions yourselves?

Thank you very much in advance and sorry this got so long.

Angela Alvarez