Woven into the many and varied items on my to-do list this week -- which range from getting my haircut to helping my husband edit one of his academic papers to writing, oh, about 6,000 blog posts -- is to be sure that every day, right before I pick up my son, I also pick up some tuna sushi.
Don't imagine for one moment that I'm doing this for myself. I dislike fish, I hate sushi and I almost never stop to eat once the whirlwind, 90-minute after-school pick-up run is in motion. (If only!)
No, I'm assiduously folding in a stop at Hi Sushi every afternoon this week because last week my son officially passed an in-hospital food challenge for tuna. This means that now that it's safe for him to eat tuna, he needs to keep eating it for the rest of his life. (Specifically, three times a week for the next fortnight and once every two weeks thereafter.) More on that below.
Dealing with food allergies is so woven into my life at this point that I sometimes forget how little the rest of the world knows about them. (An immunologist once told me that they are quite poorly understood by the medical profession as well.)
So for those of you who have a child with a known food allergy, fear that your kid might or simply wonder what is up with all those people freaking out about peanuts on an airplane, here are five facts about parenting kids with food allergies:
- The science is changing. True, allergies may not be well understood vis-a-vis other common childhood diseases. According to a 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three million U.S. children have food or digestive allergies, affecting nearly five percent of all children under five. But as the number of children suffering from food allergies continues to grow, we are learning more about the causes and treatments of food allergies with each passing year. And the science is changing. A fascinating recent article in The New Yorker detailed the nature of these changes, which -- excitingly for me -- are being carried out by a research team here in London at my son's allergy clinic. (Read a summary here; a subscription is needed for the full article.) The thrust of the article is that whereas the conventional wisdom once held that infants with food allergies should avoid the foods at all costs (unless and until they outgrew them), the new thinking is that the best way to treat allergies is to "desensitize" infants by exposing them to the allergen in small increments over time.
And speaking of which, I really must run. Hi Sushi beckons...