One of the most frequent allergies developed by people all over the world is mold allergy. If we were to give a definition for mold, or for mildew, we’d say that they belong to the fungi class. Their reproduction system is based on seeds. The mold seeds are called spores and most of the times they are spread by the wind. They float airborne until they hit something and land. If they land in fertile soil, they start to grow roots and a new plant is growing. Windy weather conditions are very good for spreading the spores, therefore this is why there are two peak seasons for mold allergy, namely spring and fall. Fog and dew can also help the mold and mildew spores to travel, in high humidity conditions.

Mold Allergy Mechanism

Like all airborne allergies, mold allergy is triggered by inhaling the mold spores. While all people in a certain place and at a certain time inhale those spores, not all of them manifest allergic reactions, because mold and mildew are harmless for the body, and a normal immune system won’t bother reacting to them entering the body via the airways. However, in case of allergic people, their immune system perceives mold spores as harmful, so it starts a war for annihilating them and kicking them out of the body. The main weapon in this war is the histamine, a substance secreted by the body, and which gives those unpleasant allergic reactions manifested as skin rashes, swelling, itchy eyes, running nose, throat irritation, or breathing troubles.

Mold Allergy Seasons

Usually, the mold allergy is more prone to occur during the time of the year when spores fly around. However, as mold and mildew are so widespread and they can grow in humid basements, or in wet bathrooms, the danger of allergic reactions to mold is present all year round. Fall is one of the high seasons for mold allergies, due to the fact that the mold can develop and grow on the rotten, fallen leaves, or on grass and on cereal crops. The safest season of all is winter, because mold is entering a sort of hibernation, therefore mold allergy makes little to no victims during this time of year.

Molds That Give Mold Allergy

Not all varieties of molds give mold allergy to sensitive people. Among the mold types that can trigger allergic reactions, there are: Aspergillus, Alternaria, Penicillium, Cladosporium (Hormodendrum), Epicoccum, Mucor, Helmin thosporium, Rhizopus , Fusarium, and Aureobasidium (Pullularia). This is less important, as those types of spores cannot be differentiated without a microscope, therefore it is vital that we keep our homes mold-free. Dehumidifiers can help mold allergy sufferers to alleviate their condition.

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Allergen air filters have the role to stop impurities and other airborne particles which can be potential allergens to pass through and enter our rooms or our car interiors, giving allergic reactions in the case of allergy sufferers. Allergy air filters eliminate bacteria, molds, pollens, dust and smoke. By using a modern technology air filter, the quality of air inside a house can be improved as quick as within one hour. Such filters are more efficient than the classical furnace filters which we know from long time ago.

Types of Allergen Air Filters

The most common allergies that occur via the respiratory system are allergy and asthma symptoms caused by airborne allergens such as pollens from flowers or trees, dust mites which cover all surfaces in our homes or hide in our bed linens, in our pillows and mattresses, animal dander which is produced by pets and is formed of dead skin scales falling off the animal, mold and fungi allergies, and food allergies.
Air filters can help reducing the amount of allergens in the air we breathe, thus offering an allergy relief. There are several types of allergen air filters:

HEPA Cleaner Allergen Air Filters

Such HEPA air filters can be found in many household appliances, from modern vacuum cleaners to air purifiers and air sterilizers. These filters are made of a mat of randomly arranged fibers and they prevent the passage of minimum 99.97% of the airborne particles of 0.3 micrometers in diameter. You can see that bigger particles have no chance of getting through the air filtering system. These allergen air filters were invented back in the 1940s, but at that time their purpose was to filter the radioactive contaminated particles in the nuclear industry. Later, during the 1950s, HEPA air filters were incorporated in vacuum cleaners, offering allergy and asthma sufferers the possibility of an almost normal life, free of symptoms.

Ionic Air Purifiers

These allergen air filters act by polarizing the air, releasing negative ions into the atmosphere. Although the beneficial action of negative air ions on the human body is still disputed and not very much trusted by the medical world, allergen air filters based on ionic devices have gained in popularity over the past decade in Europe, as well as in Japan and in the US.

Electrostatic Allergen Air Filters

These filters include electrostatic fibers that capture harmful airborne micro particles including smoke, pet dander, mold, bacteria, and large particles including dust, pollen and lint. Most of them remove almost 90% of airborne micro particles responsible for allergies in humans.

Whatever type of allergen air filters you’d choose, the difference in your life as an allergic will be noticeable.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This is a question I’ve asked myself many times: is it a direct relationship between allergies and hearing? Many allergology specialists said there is no direct connection, however, severe allergies which involve inflammations of the internal ear may cause hearing loss, as consequence of another ailment which follows, namely otitis media.

Children are the biggest risk group when it comes to allergies and hearing loss, due to the fact that middle ear infections are very frequent amongst them. Statistics show that there are very few children who didn’t suffer from this kind of infection at least once in a lifetime.

As a conclusion, if you suspect your kids are allergic, you have all the resons in the world to get them tested as soon as possible, in order to avoid such complications given by allergies. Hearing loss, even temporary, is making big damage in young children, because their speech won’t develop properly if they can’t hear well.

Sometimes it is very simple to keep your child away from allergic reactions, simply by removing from alimentation the incriminated allergen. If he gets allergies each time he eats apples, wouldn’t it be so easy not to give him this food anymore than treat recurrent ear ailments which could cause him language and understanding problems that would affect him for the entire life?

Keep your children healthy and without allergies, hearing what they have to say when they feel seak.

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There are people who crave for certain foods. It is not unusual that pregnant women have such cravings, so they send their husbands to buy strawberries in the winter, in the middle of the night. Craving for particular foods is thought to be in fact the need of your body for certain substances that those foods contain.

Some scientists think that cravings are allergy-specific, but they cannot find a sustained reason for that statement. Anyway, if this is true, then you can say that allergies can make you fat, because the more you crave, the more you eat, the fatter you get. It happens often that a person allergic to strawberries, for example, feels a very strong need to eat strawberries, despite the fact that he / she knows very well that it will give them an allergic reaction, eventually getting their arms, legs and even the face sometimes covered with ugly, painful hives and urticaria.

It is possible that this has to do with the body struggling to maintain the endorphins level, thus craving for the allergen to be ingested, likewise the addiction mechanisms. But allergic persons should be aware that exposing themselves frequently to the allergen, will only make their allergy get worse, and eventually they might become fat, if they crave for highly nutritive foods.

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How to Arrange Food Allergy Testing

In casee4 you notice symptoms such as skin irritation, hives, rash, swelling, whenever you are eating certain foods, then you should suspect food allergies and ask for investigations. The main way to stay symptom-free is avoidance of the incriminated foods, so the sooner you know which are they, the better.

Food allergy testing

For identifying a food allergy, you need to go for special tests. After you have the list of substances which trigger allergic reactions from your immune system, you need to stay away from them. Repeated exposure to the allergen will only exacerbate your allergy symptoms. Eventually, it may even endanger your life, as death by suffocation is possible, due to the swelling of your airway passages.

Being allergic to certain substances (foods, pollens, dust or anything else) means that your immune system perceives those otherwise harmless substances as a menace to the body, and starts fighting to eliminate them. This body fight consists on releasing chemicals to neutralize the enemies, thus provoking you unpleasant and dangerous symptoms.

Food allergies testing can be done in two ways:

Food Allergies Skin Prick Test

A food allergy skin prick test is based on making a small prick on the skin using a needle and pouring a little amount of the allergen you want to test for. After a half an hour, in case you are allergic, your skin would have reacted and became all red and swollen around the prick. The bigger the reaction, the more severe your allergy to that substance.

If you are not allergic, there would be absolutely no swelling at all. The advantage of the allergy prick test is that you get your results very fast (immediately) and it is not painful.

There are yet some situations when prick tests are dangerous to be performed: if you had a very violent allergic reaction, then putting your body in contact with the allergen may cause you severe symptoms which are not local but generalized, so you may even die from such a test. In order not to threaten your life, you’d better go for the second type of allergy testing:

Food Allergy Blood Test

This test is safe, as it requires you to give a blood sample, which would be taken to the lab and put in contact with the suspected allergens. There, the level of histamines released by your blood would be measured and the values would be compared with the benchmark ones.
The results can take a few weeks until complete, but you’ll receive a long list with foods which you need top avoid in order to improve your life quality and even save yourself from death. Food allergies are not a joke at all.

Categories: Allergy Tips, Allergy general info, Food Allergy
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Is Nasal Allergy Bothering You?

How many times did you feel like your nose is going like crazy, getting all itchy and sensitive, and running like a broken tap? It is very possible that you didn’t catch a cold, but you are sensitive to certain substances in the air, with we call allergens, and which could trigger an allergic reaction from your body. This reaction can manifest in the nasal area, giving you all these unpleasant and irritating symptoms. The triggers can be many things, like pollen or dust, but also mold spores, or animal dander. They are airborne, an as we breathe them, they are penetrating the nasal mucosa and get in contact with our blood. If the blood thinks they are harmful substances, the alarm mechanism is triggered and it will alert the blood cells like lymphocytes and mast cells, and it will start the secretion of histamine, thus sensitizing the nasal mucosa membrane making it more and more sensitive with each incident of this type.

But the process goes on. Our immune system has an elaborated defense scheme, and it will throw into the battle the macrophages, who are in fact our scavengers, eating the foreign cells and preventing us getting invaded by them. IgE antibodies also play a role in this process, because they bind to the basophil and mastocite cells. In this way, histamine is released into the body, but the process isn’t harmless for the human body, as it causes swelling, redness, itching sensations and other symptoms which are typical for allergic reactions.

How to avoid nasal allergy?

The best way is to discover which are the allergens that cause you the reaction, then to avoid exposure to them. If you are allergic to pollen, don’t go out of the house in the days with high pollen activity levels - you’ll know then from the weather reports in your area. If you have an allergy to dust mites, don’t do your household cleaning by yourself. either get somebody else do the dusting for you, or, if this is not possible, wear gloves and a dust-proof mask and wash yourself thoroughly with plenty of water after you finish.

HEPA filters are very efficient in filtrating pollens, so you may consider buying one, and using it during the pollen season, which is late spring, and early fall in some regions, but can be even longer in other countries.

Air cleaners and humidifiers also can play a positive role in keeping an allergic symptoms-free.

Always consult with your doctor before attempting anything to release your allergy symptoms. The physician knows better your history and your medical needs, and he can indicate you the best ways of keeping yourself healthy and in a good state of being. Do not follow advice from neighbors and friends, because each patient is unique, and what may work well for them can be harmful for you. Nasal allergy needs to be treated with all your consideration.

Categories: Allergy Tips, Nasal Allergy
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Avoiding Allergy Medications With Children

Childhood Asthma - Getting Your Child Off Allergy Medications

A child with asthma and allergies may not know that asthma and allergies is the number #1 chronic childhood disease.

He also may not know that asthma claims more lives every year even though more treatments are available. It is a fact that there are over 3 million more Americans with asthma than there were 10 years ago.
Why the rise in asthma and allergies?

With todays busier society, our house-cleaning standard have plummeted. We also have become a generation of ‘couch potatoes’…spending over 95% of our time indoors. Our homes are tightly insulated and limit ventilation of household irritants such as mold, smoke and chemicals.

This all results in increased exposure to allergens. And
allergens are the number one cause of allergy and asthma attacks. Allergy medications are being used on a daily basis as a way to control allergies & asthma. With children prevention of allergies is far better than taking allergy medications.

There are five simple things that can be done to reduce allergy symptoms and possibly reduce the use of allergy medications.

1) Never allow smoking in the home. Smoke will remain in an indoor environment for up to 10 years, even though you can no longer see or smell it.

2) Shoes should be taken off at the door to prevent allergens from being brought in on the shoes.

3) Use non-toxic cleaning products instead of store bought chemical brands. All cleaning products are eventually inhaled or absorbed into the skin. Do you really want to clean with even a ‘little bit’ of poison?

4) Do not let pets into the bedrooms. All pets have dander and it can be an allergen. Children spend around 8 hours in the bedroom at night. Keep it as allergy free as possible.

5) Make sure humidity levels in the home don’t go over 45%. Humidifiers attached to the furnace are more reliable than freestanding ones. Humidifiers with damp filters in them can be a mold breeding area.

It is important to try to create a clean healthy environment for your child so he can breathe easy and not have to rely on allergy medications which can have negative side effects.

Deborah Mumm has been in the Indoor Air industry since 1996. She has written various articles on asthma, allergies

and indoor air pollution plus gives talks to teachers and small groups on the effects of indoor air pollution.
Her web site offers products for a healthy home ~ http://www.healthy-environments.com
She offers an e-book on tips to avoid allergy medications on her site.

Categories: Allergy Tips, Children and Allergy
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