Search Results for: Gwen Smith

  This issue marks Allergic Living’s fifth anniversary. Yippee for us – and heartfelt thanks to all of you loyal readers. To be honest, back in the drawing board stages, before our first issue was published in May 2005, there were doubters. First, launching a magazine of any description had its risks. Were we, excuse the [...]

From Allergic Living magazine, Spring 2005. IN LABS in universities and hospitals across North America and Europe, these are exciting and competitive times in allergy research. There are strong prospects for a vaccine that would significantly increase a peanut-allergic individual’s tolerance to the dread legume. And, while farther off into the future, scientists are speaking [...]

Yet-to-be released research on Montreal schoolchildren shows the incidence of peanut allergy has increased – to almost 2 per cent of pupils. This makes it the highest such prevalence ever measured. The findings are early results of the second phase in a study of peanut allergy incidence in pupils in kindergarten up to Grade 3 [...]

Alarm bells went off for Sarah Cameron* that day in 2008 when her 8-year-old daughter came home from school in a state of high agitation. There had been an incident during lunch break. The girl recounted how one of two Grade 6 monitors supervising the kids in her classroom had ordered her to sit at [...]

In the radio documentary she made, Sabrina Shannon, just shy of 10, holds the microphone in front of her mother and asks what it’s like to have a daughter with allergies. Then she adds: “Do you think I’m beautiful?” With mock earnestness, Sara Shannon replies, “I think you’re probably the best-looking girl in the world.” [...]

She has known a parent’s greatest grief: Sara Shannon lost her daughter Sabrina to anaphylaxis in the 13-year-old’s first year of high school. But out of tragedy, hope has been born: Ontario passed Sabrina’s Law in 2005, which requires schools to have anaphylaxis policies, to reduce allergen exposure and to train all staff in the [...]

On May 16, 2005, a large group of parents and their kids with food allergies sat in the public gallery nosebleed section of the Ontario legislature, waiting for a bill to come before the politicians assembled below. The “no-peanut” gallery was shushed by security guards who countenanced not so much as a whisper. On the [...]

Scott Sicherer, M.D., is an associate professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and a leading food allergy researcher at the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute. At the CSACI conference in Montreal, Allergic Living spoke with him about his new book, Understanding and Managing your Child’s Food Allergies(Johns Hopkins University [...]

The shocking deaths of two teens provide clues to what goes wrong in fatal reactions. WHEN news surfaced that 15-year-old Christina Desforges of Saguenay, Quebec, had died of what appeared to be an anaphylactic reaction to a kiss from a boyfriend who had eaten a peanut butter sandwich, the story travelled from Canada to Mexico [...]

Most Canadians with life-threatening allergies are not carrying the life-saving drug epinephrine with them. In addition to that worrying trend, a national survey reveals that a majority of Canadians would not know what to do if faced with a person having a serious allergic reaction. The survey of 1,500 Canadians, released in late August, was [...]