4X Food Allergies in Black Male Children

Another interesting result from the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, held last week in Washington. I wrote about one, A Patch for Lessening Dairy Allergies on Thursday.

This one was reported by Rosemary Black of the New York Daily News.

Black male children are at an especially high risk for developing food allergies, according to a new study presented Tuesday in Washington, DC, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.

They’re about four times as likely to be food allergic as the rest of the population, says Dr. Andrew Liu, a co-author of the study, which he says was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

The study was an unusually large and accurate one.

The survey was the first one in the U.S. in which researchers actually took blood samples and tested them for signs of potential food allergy, says Dr. Scott Sicherer, co-author of the study and professor of pediatrics at Mt. Sinai Medical Center. The study involved 8,203 participants who ranged in age from 1 to 85 and had a food sensitivity to egg, milk, peanut and shrimp. Blacks, males and children, especially black male children, were found to have higher levels of the immune responses associated with clinical food allergy, Liu explained.

Black also quoted Dr. Anatoly Belilovsky, a Brooklyn-based pediatrician and allergy expert, as saying "Some studies have shown that being on a farm has a protective effect against allergies."

That's important, and I'll have more to say about that in a post coming up in a day or two.