We’ve got a question from one of our readers:
My dog is allergic to peanut butter. Do you know any remedies for this kind of dog allergy?
As dog allergy is a very important and delicate issue, we felt like writing this short article containing the answer.
Allergy, be it in humans or dogs, or any other pet, is incurable. Repeated exposure to the substance that causes the allergic reaction only makes it worse, and aggravates the symptoms. The only cure is to stay away from the incriminated allergen. In your case, you should keep your dog away from peanut butter. There are many foods dog eat, so it shouldn’t be a problem to take the peanut butter out of his diet. This also goes for humans a well. Although for humans there are drugs which alleviate allergy symptoms (antihistamine medication), those drugs only work on the symptoms and not on the condition which causes those symptoms. Allergy cannot be cured. There is a possibility of getting a vaccine for desensitization, but the process takes several years and it doesn’t grant the same resutls for each patient. Besides, those shots are quite painful and they have to be administered several times a week.
This is why, in case of food allergy, the best thing is to stay away from the food which causes you the allergic reactions and you’ll be well. The same principle applies to dog allergy.
Categories: Allergy Tips, Pets Allergy
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Perennial allergic rhinitis is a condition which resembles a lot to hay fever, showing the same range of symptoms and the same mechanism of action: there is always an allergen involved. When exposed to this allergen, an inflammation of the nasal and ocular mucosa occurs, leading to blockage of the airway passages. Unlike the seasonal allergic rhinitis which occurs only in spring and autumn, with the occasion of some pollens getting airborne, perennial allergic rhinitis is an all year round affection, which makes it tough to be supported without severe decreasing of the quality of life. If we think that the main symptoms of perennial allergic rhinitis are a permanent cold (at least the cold symptoms, not the cold itself), sore throat, headaches, or even a severe decrease of concentration, or heavy fatigue (due to the lack of sleep caused by the stuffed nose) there’s no wonder that people are cery concerned about this illness which cannot be cured.
There was this study which showed the correlation between perennial allergic rhinitis and alcohol consumption in women:
There is a link between alcohol consumption and increased risk of perennial allergic rhinitis, according to a recent Danish study of 5,870 young adult women. The study, published in the July issue of Clinical and Experimental Allergy, found that the risk increased 3% for every additional alcoholic drink per week.
Source: Medical News Today (the link leads to the study details)
Categories: Nasal Allergy
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This is a question we’ve got from one of our readers: can dog allergy cause death?
The answer is that any allergy can cause death. It all depends on how violent the allergic response to the allergent exposure is. To make it more clear, one can have a mild allergy to mold, let’s say, and experience only slight symptoms of irritation, itching or sneezing. The same person can have an extremely severe allergy to wasp venom, without even knowing it. In the moment he gets stung by a wasp and his body gets in contact with the venom, a raging allergic reaction is triggered, with major implications for all vital systems functions, like breathing or blood circulation. The immune system wrongly assumes that the body is in major danger, and it starts a real war against the enemy, with the purpose of neutralizing it as soon as possible. This is called anaphylaxis, or anaphylactic shock, and it is a major affection which needs emergency treatment with epinephrine. There’s very little time from the occurrence time until death installs: only a few minutes, so in case this happens to somebody near you, don’t wait: call the paramedics. If you’re lucky, they’d save the person’s life.
Usually, people who were diagnosed with severe, life threatening allergies, must carry with them an epinephrine pen, and administer themselves the drug immediately after they’ve been exposed to the allergen.
If you know that you or one of your family members is allergic, you’d better test yourself and tell the other members of your family to get tested too, so you minimize the risk of suffering an anaphylaxis.
Even though you know that you only have a mild allergy to some substance, like dog dander, you still have to be careful. First, you shouldn’t have a dog at all, but if you do, you must watch yourself and call an ambulance at the slightest signs that your allergy worsens. Repeated exposure to the allergy-triggering factor leads in time to the aggravation of the symptoms, up to a severe or even lethal level.
So, allergy is not at all a joke and it should be treated seriously. Never ignore it, or you’ll pay a price with many times can be too high, for a disease which can be kept under control for a lifetime.
Categories: Dog Allergy
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Allergies are abnormal reactions of the immune system against harmless substances which enter in contact with the body. Due to a malfunction, the body detects and identifies those substances (which can be foods, latex, pollens, dust mites) as harmful for the health and integrity of the allergic person.
Likewise humans, pets can also suffer from allergies. Pet food allergies can be identified when seeing the animal scratching itself a lot. If you see your dog scratching and chewing himself a lot, make a visual check to see if it’s not the case of a flea allergy. After you’ve elliminated this possibility, you can think of another kind of dog allergy, namely the food allergy.
Food allergies in pets are a challenge, because the only cure is to remove the allergen foods from the animal’s diet. For this, you have to find out which are those allergens, and this can be done via a diet of ellimination: remove foods one at atime and see if the pet still has allergy symptoms. When symptoms are gone, you should stick to the diet which was good for him for the rest of his life, if you want to have a healthy pet.
Categories: Pets Allergy
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More and more dog owners are aware that their dogs may suffer from allergies, exactly like humans do. A dog allergy can be triggered by common allergens, such as fleas, pampas grass, or specific foods.
If you notice your dog scratching a lot, or sneezing almost continuously for days, or if you see its fur falling off in large amounts, then you can suspect a dog alergy and try to further investigate the problem.
Step one: closely examine the dog’s skin, looking for signs of parasites like fleas or ticks. Any small, black spots of dirt can come from such parasites, so even if you don’t see the insects with your very eyes, you can still give your pet an anti-flea treatment.
After you removed the flea allergy suspicion, watch your dog while playing outside: do the allergy symptoms occur mainly after frequenting some specific locations? Are there any peculiar plants in those places? Pollens? Pampas grass? Weeds? If you cannot establish a relation between the allergic reactions of your dog and the places he’s been in, you’d need to step further, in suspecting a food allergy.
Food allergies in dogs, like the ones in humans are properly diagnosed by an ellimination diet. Remove one food at a time from your dog’s diet and watch the symptoms for about 1-2 weeks. Are the allergy symptoms still there, or are they alleviating slowly, to disappearance? If after one month of elimination diet your dog’s allergic manifestations are gone, then you know that was the food which acted like an allergen in this case. By simply removing it completely from the diet, your dog would be allergy-free for the rest of his life.
If the allergy symptoms are still present, then remove another food from your dog’s nutrition and repeat the observation until you manage to find out the cause of the allergy.
Don’t try to treat your dog with human alergy medication! This can be harmful and even cause your dog’s death. Humans and pets have different mechanisms of reaction to different substances. For example, a human can eat onions without any problem, while feeding a cat with onions would kill it, because onions contain a substance which is poisonous for cats. It is that easy to harm your pet!
The best advice, in case you notice allergy-like manifestations on your dog, is to take it to a vet, who can perform thorough investigations and give an appropriate allergy treatment for your dog. While airborn allergies may be difficult to control, especially in case of dogs, because you need to take your dog for a walk at least twice a day from obvious reasons, dog food allergies shouldn’t be a problem, once you get them diagnosed. Just don’t give your dog those foods anymore and you’re done.
Categories: Dog Allergy
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Regular drinking of alcohol increases the risk of developing allergic rhinitis.
Danish researchers from the Centre for Alcohol Research, National Institute of Public Health Denmark, organized a study with the aim of investigating how daily alcohol ingestion relates to the occurence of allergic rhinitis in young women. This prospective cohort study was done on 5870 women between 20 and 29 years old, who were free of either seasonal or perennial allergic rhinitis, and it took two years.
The results showed that there was no association between alcohol consumption and seasonal allergic rhinitis, but there was a connection between alcohol consumption and perennial allergic rhinitis.
Another study, which was spread over a 9 years period also showed that drinking more than two glasses of wine on a daily basis doubles the risk of developing allergy symptoms in young women.
This could be a possible explanation for the fact that allergies are on the increase over the past ten years. Women discovered alcohol, learned to enjoy it, then enjoyed too much of it, therefore harming their immune system and triggering allergic reactions and manifestations like hay fever, sore eyes, running nose, itching, sneezing or even skin rashes.
Categories: Allergy News
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Thinking of medicine, allergy is one of the diseases which cannot be cured, but only have their symptoms alleviated with the help of appropriate medication. Allergy requires antihistamine medication and most of the times, the patient treatment can be done at home. Such a chronic treatment needs an increased level of discipline compared to an acute treatment which would have a limited duration and not a lifetime like the chronic treatments.
How Medicine For Allergy Works
The medicine allergy sufferers would take are called antihistamines. Those drugs act upon the levels of the histamine in the body, histamine being a substance secreted by our body with the purpose of defense against intruders like foreign substances, or at least against whatever our immune system perceives as being natural enemies for the human body and its vital functions.
Besides medicine, allergy demands that the house in which the allergic lives to be kept extremely clean, free of allergens, therefore a series of measures are a must: basement mold removal, cleaning mold and mildew from all corners and rooms, mold spore removal (because removing the mold spores is crucial for getting rid of it for a long time), anti dust mite measures and more. These actions rather relate to hygiene than to medicine. Allergy is more than a disease against which we take a treatment and we live OK, allergy is a lifestyle in itself, as we need to learn how to protect ourselves from exposure to allergens we’ve tested positive to.
So, never rely solely on medicine. Allergy wants your full attention.
Categories: Allergy Tips
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Dog allergy has become more and more an issue nowadays, when people want to have dogs despite the fact that they don’t have the living conditions for that. We keep our dogs in small apartments, they eat with us in our kitchen, they sleep with us in our bedrooms, and then we wonder why dog allergies are on the increase.
When I say dog allergy, I mean both humans being allergic to dogs and dogs getting flea allergy or developing allergic reactions to substances in our homes. Allergy is a tricky disease, therefore it may be difficult to diagnose, especially in the case of dogs or other pets, as they need surveillance to see if they behave in other way than they usually do. For example, a dog scratches itself anyway to a certain degree, and nobody takes the dog to a vet each time they see the pet scratching. However, if scratching becomes a habit and it occurs repeatedly, many times a day, then we can suspect a dog allergy, most probably a flea allergy, so a visit to the veterinary would be welcome.
When to suspect a dog allergy
Continuous scratching is the first symptom of a dog allergy. Other signs you may look for are rashes or irritations of the skin, hairs falling unevenly, in big numbers, red and teary eyes, sneezing or coughing.
If you can, try to see when the symptoms occur during a day’s time: is it happening only when the dog enters a certain room? Is it happening immediately after meals? When playing in the park? What triggers this allergic response from its body?
Always look carefully at the animal’s skin and fur. If you notice small black spots which go away with ease when you grab them, then you have reasons to suspect your dog has fleas. Regardless the fact that he may or may not have a flea allergy, you still need to get him rid of those insects, because they are carriers of many diseases anyway.
The reverse look upon a dog allergy is when humans get allergic reaction in presence of dogs. The best advice is not to keep dogs anymore if you get diagnosed with dog allergy. Continuous exposure to the allergen would make your condition worsen in time, and you may end up with serious troubles if you keep on ignoring your symptoms. If you insist on having a dog while being allergic, then you need to take care of a perfect hygiene in your house: always wash the dog very well, don’t let it enter your bedroom, don’t allow him sit on your favorite chair. In general, try to minimize your contact with the dog and stay away from, playing with it too closely. Dog allergy is serious issue.
Categories: Dog Allergy
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Anaphylactic reaction or Anaphylaxis is an extremely violent allergic reaction of a person who has got into contact with a substance he’s allergic to. This reaction may occur when the body gets in touch with the allergen for the first time in life, or at a later contact, after a previous series of smaller, repeated contacts spread over time.
If it happens at the first allergen contact, and if the patient manages to get to the hospital, and he is saved by epinephrine administration, he is warned. Now he knows that he must avoid getting in contact with that killer substance for the rest of his life. As this is not always possible, persons who are known to develop anaphylactic reactions to a widespread allergen should always carry with them an epinephrine pen, and give himself a shot immediately after the unwanted contact. For example, if you have a severe allergy to bees, you shouldn’t by all means get close to hives. But as bees are pretty much everywhere in some areas, you may end up with one of them stinging you. Then, if you don’t take the epinephrine shot in a matter of seconds after the incident, you are in big trouble, because the allergic reaction will be so violent that a half an hour could be lethal.
Pampass grass, or Cortaderia, is a fast growing, perennial plant which grown tall like 15-20 inches and which has silky flower heads which can have different colors, like yellow, purple, pink or white. Seeded in early spring, the plants will be mature and blossom by August. Pampass grass is resistant to lack of water, so it may grow well even in dry climate conditions. It is an ornamental plant, but it is a real danger for allergic persons, because it produces a lot of pollen, which is one of the most common allergens.
In case you are known to be allergic and you live in an area with lots of Pampas grass, you can go to your doctor and ask to be tested against this specific allergen, in order to make sure you won’t develop an anaphylactic reaction to it in the future. If you test positive, probably your doctor would recommend you to carry an epinephrine pen ,and he’d teach uyou how to use it in case symptoms occur.
Categories: Allergy Tips
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In one of my previous articles, I was talking about dog allergy. I’ve been asked by a reader how can a flea allergy be diagnosed in dogs?
First of all, let me tell you that allergic or not, no dog should have fleas as a general rule. Of course, from time to time, your dog will have the occasion to get fleas from outside, from the park, from grass, but the dog owner, if he is responsible enough, and if he cares for his pet, would give the dog anti-flea treatments.
Flea Allergy Symptoms
The main symptom which can lead you to suspect your dog has a flea allergy is scratching. By this, I don’t mean the regular scratching which all dogs do, but almost continuous scratching, with high intensity.
If you notice that at your dog, closely examine his fur, carefully look between the hairs, to see the skin. Many times, you’ll see the flea running fast and hiding behind other hairs, thus making it almost impossible to catch it. Other times, you’ll see nothing moving. However, if the dog’s fur has signs of black dirt, small spots of dark color, then you may suspect he got some naughty fleas.
If the dog has a strong flea allergy, you’ll be able to observe skin irritations, and even the fur falling down in unusually big amounts.
Getting your dog diagnosed for flea allergy
If you notice any of the above mentioned symptoms, get your dog to the vet. He’ll be able to diagnose a flea allergy on the spot, and anyway, think that your dog shouldn’t have fleas at all, under no circumstances, so use anti-flea products to prevent that.
Your vet will tell you if you need to let your dog be taken a blood sample to get him tested for flea allergy.
Categories: Pets Allergy
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