Living with Dangerous Food Allergies

Mealtime should be an enjoyable experience. Yet, for 12 million children with food allergies, eating a meal can be a frightening activity. For some of these children, even the slightest exposure to the wrong food can be deadly.

Heidi Roehrig is the mother of a 4-year old boy* with nut allergies. A year ago, her son had a severe allergic reaction after eating trail mix with nuts.

“Our life has changed incredibly. Suddenly we’re afraid of play dates and birthdays. These should be fun – you want them to be fun for your child – but we’re fearful of not being able to control all the foods,” says Roehrig.

In the Roehrig family, simple summer pleasures like going to the ice cream parlor don’t take place anymore. Too many of the ice creams contain nuts, and the family has no way of knowing if surfaces and tools have been cleaned correctly.

“There are lots of things that just aren’t enjoyable anymore because we can’t feel confident that our son isn’t going to have a reaction. Even grocery shopping is a huge ordeal – you have to read the label on everything, including foods you buy every week, because you never know when it’s going to change,” she says.

The impact of food allergies on the family is tremendous. For the families of children who have developed severe food allergies, it alters every aspect of life, whether it’s babysitters, daycare, visiting family and friends, even going to the doctor’s office.

The process of diagnosing food allergies, though welcome, also poses its own problems. Testing children with serious food allergies can be an extremely stressful and even dangerous situation. These concerns have prompted the University of Michigan Health System to create an innovative Food Allergy Clinic that offers families a safe and relaxing facility to test or challenge for food allergies. It was designed specifically to provide a safe environment for allergy experts to evaluate and treat patients with food allergies.

“We have built a controlled area where children can come to be evaluated and diagnosed. The resulting data allow us to develop what we call a ‘challenge.’ In most of our challenges, we introduce a food that we believe can be tolerated now that the child is older. We can also do airborne challenges to see if a child will have an allergic reaction to a smell, such as to peanuts,” explains Marc McMorris, M.D., medical director of the clinic and clinical associate professor of internal medicine and pediatrics.

Because some food allergies, including the smells, can be dangerous or life-threatening, the clinic’s design controls airflow from room to room, allowing several patients to be seen and evaluated at the same time.

“We also have more control over preparing the foods – that is essential when it comes to certain types of foods, or developing challenges where we want to be able to hide the food in certain other kinds of food and feed it to the patient without them knowing they’re getting it,” says McMorris.