Foreword

I vividly remember a dinner gathering, many years ago, at a local Thai restaurant. Just as the group was sitting down, one woman pulled a bottle of Benadryl™ out of her purse, gave her young daughter a couple of spoonfuls, and said to no one in particular, “She's terribly allergic to peanuts, but she loves them, so we just dose her up before we let her eat them!” I recall anxiously wondering if I would be called upon to resuscitate this child while I nibbled at my pad thai! (I was not, but I do remember later noticing the child's extensive eczema, and thinking that I had just been lucky.) What I needed was this month's issue of CPPAH on the topic of food allergies in children.

A quick Google search on the topic is revealing. Very professional looking websites declare that over 100 million people in the US suffer from feeling bad all over because of unrecognized food allergies (amenable to treatment by buying their books and products), or that childhood food allergies are the explanation for most behavioral problems in children. These sites go on to say that medicine simply doesn't recognize this reality, so don't expect your doctor to help you. As always, the best way to combat this sort of misinformation is to be prepared with high quality information.

In this month's issue of CPPAH, Dr. Carla Davis of Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital provides a thorough discussion of childhood food allergies from the clinical perspective. While food allergies are not nearly as common as parents think they are, they are nevertheless common enough to be on every pediatric care provider's radar screen; and—as noted—misconceptions about them abound. Dr. Davis carefully reviews the differences between adverse reactions to foods and food allergies, the signs and symptoms of immune-mediated food allergy, and discusses the uses and limitations of the diagnostic tools that are currently available. She explains treatment options both currently available and coming soon as research in this area expands. Armed with this high quality information, you will be able to protect your patients from some of the inaccurate if not downright dangerous misinformation that their parents are exposed to on all sides.

As always, our goal at CPPAH is to improve the care of children by bringing you information that is clear, concise, and relevant to pediatric practice. If I had only had all this issue at hand at that dinner gathering long ago, I might have said, “Please, just pass on the peanuts!”