The Elephant in the Room Part 1

This article, titled "New treatments for peanut allergies only raise same old questions for me", is written by the person born around 1992 who has peanut allergy herself and is writing about a potential new and effective treatment for combating this allergy:

So when recently sparked optimistic headlines after releasing clinical trial results that its allergy product, AR101, would reduce the risks linked to an accidental exposure to peanuts, I received the usual wave of questions from friends, co-workers and my parents: Would you try it? Could this help? 

Aimmune, based in Brisbane, California, is just one company eyeing the prize. Childhood peanut allergy diagnoses increased more than 20 percent in the United States from 2010 to 2017. The global market for relief is worth as much as $2 billion. The French drugmaker DBV Technologies is also working to commercialise a peanut allergy patch. Other companies, including industry giant Sanofi, are following their lead.

On 19th October 2018, I made a post about a potential Peanut Vaccine and this current article just reinforces the fact that a very profitable industry has sprung up around peanut and other allergies. There is even a new category of medical specialist, the paediatric allergist, that has arisen to combat this scourge.

Of course nowhere does the 26 year old author of the article under discussion allude to vaccinations as a possible source of her allergy. She simply accepts her condition and has some decidedly odd notions as revealed by this quote:

A colleague's young daughter who was born with multiple allergies used that very treatment, as did a younger cousin of mine who, for the first several years of her life, was allergic to almost everything but fruits and vegetables. 

That phrase "born with multiple allergies" makes ones eyes pop. She seems to believe that allergies are genetic or the result of exposure in utero (perhaps to peanuts that the mother has ingested). She does allude in the article to Big Pharma profiteering:

Tina Sindher, a pediatric allergist at Stanford University, pointed out that the Aimmune pill is a repackaged, clinically tested version of that homegrown oral therapy many allergists have been using. DBV's peanut patch, Viaskin, to a lesser extent, is the same - more convenient, perhaps, and more regulated, but still a variation on the existing medical approach. 

"This concept has been around for a long time," she said. What's new is the addition of labour, standardisation and federal oversight - which companies then say demonstrates increased value. 

It highlights a pattern I've noticed from my reporting: Drugmakers develop medication that refines a low-tech remedy, run a clinical trial to secure FDA approval and then sell it at a higher price. 

For pharma, it's a logical way to profit.

Logical indeed. She doesn't seem too troubled by the profiteering. Interestingly, she makes the observation that "my twin brother was allergy-free until about a year ago. Adult onset peanut allergy isn't that uncommon)". I haven't heard anything about adult onset peanut allergies. Something to investigate further. Her now ten year old brother however, is allergic to peanuts. The disturbing thing about articles like this is that no suspicion is cast on vaccinations as a possible cause of the allergies. Like autism, auto-immune diseases, ADHD and so on, these are simply afflictions to befall some unlucky children. Who knows why? 

Meanwhile, the elephant is still in the room but nobody is talking about it.

Click here for Part 2

A Peanut Allergy Vaccine?

An article appeared in Medical News Today in April about a vaccine that is being developed in an attempt to suppress peanut allergies in children. It begins:

The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) deem food allergies "a growing food safety and public health concern." 

They estimate that 4–6 percent of all children in the United States are affected by food allergies, though other reports reveal that percentage to be much higher. 

Of all food allergies, those to peanuts are the most common. 

Food allergies do not yet have a cure, and allergic reactions can prove fatal. In fact, the only way to "prevent" allergies is to stay away from the allergen.

 The article goes on to say that:

A new study, however, offers hope for people with peanut allergies, as a vaccine that has been two decades in the making has just been proven successful in mice. 

The research — which has now been published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology — was carried out by scientists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. They were led by Jessica O'Konek, a researcher at the university's Food Allergy Centre. 

O'Konek and team explain that food allergies are caused by a faulty immune reaction, wherein the body overproduces antibodies called Immunoglobulin E (IgE). 

This occurs as a result of a skewed immune response from immune cells called T helper 2 (Th2). In the new research, the scientists hypothesised that rerouting these Th2 cells might help to regulate the allergic immune response. 

To test this hypothesis, O'Konek and colleagues sensitised mice to peanut proteins so that their immune system produced IgE antibodies and their Th2 cells behaved in the same way that they would in an allergic reaction. 

When exposed to peanuts, the rodents thusly sensitised developed the same allergic symptoms, such as itchy skin and obstructed breathing, as humans. 

The researchers then administered the rodents one dose of the nasal vaccine per month for 3 months, and they measured their allergic response 2 weeks after the final dose. 

The vaccine successfully protected the rodents from exposure to peanuts, with tests showing decreased activity of the Th2 cells, as well as decreased IgE antibodies.

Food allergies have exploded in prevalence and incidence over the past two decades or so but there is seemingly no thought been given as to why this might be so. Could the reason be the damage caused to the immune systems of young children by vaccinations? The dramatic increase in the number of vaccines since 1960 is dramatically portrayed below (double click to enlarge):

A little investigation led me a book called The History of the Peanut Allergy Epidemic by Heather Fraser that was published in 2010. Here the review of the book that I came across. To quote directly from her book:

Medical literature has illustrated that the only means by which mass allergy has ever been created was by injection. With the pairing of the hypodermic needles and vaccines at the close of the 19th century, allergy and anaphylaxis made their explosive entry into the western world. Serum sickness from this new procedure was the first mass allergic phenomenon in history. Epidemic allergy to penicillin reminiscent of the ‘days of serum sickness’ emerged with its mass application following WWII. And with it came peanut allergy. Penicillin was administered using POB, the Romansky peanut oil formula. The continued use of refined peanut oil in drugs and vaccine adjuvants resulted in the slow growth of the allergy primarily in children until the late 1980s when its prevalence exploded. Extensive and sudden changes to childhood vaccination precipitated the new mass allergy to peanut.

Here is a recent video from January of 2018 in which she talks about the experiences that led her to write the book.

The influence of her book and her ongoing campaigning to make vaccination a choice seem to have had little effect on the medical establishment as this current push for a peanut allergy vaccine demonstrates. 

Well, it's depressing but hardly surprising. The following quotation from the same review is a good note to end on. 

Vaccines had proved to be very profitable for the pharmaceutical companies in the early years of the 20th century and, once they had been protected from litigation by those who believed they or their children had been damaged by vaccination by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme, the pharmaceutical companies ‘went back into’ vaccine manufacture with a will. 

But this time there was an added bonus. 

Although the connection between the two was never made, the increase in allergy across the board during the 1970s and 80s, including potentially fatal anaphylaxis, offered a whole new market to pharmaceutical companies and, indeed to the food industry. 

The development of the Epipen in the 1980s, delivering the only known antidote to an anaphylactic attack, proved to be a commercial goldmine while managing allergy presented endless opportunities for new drugs and new treatments 

Meanwhile, the ‘freefrom’ food industry (now, in 2010, worth billions of dollars world wide) was born – creating foods which would be free of peanuts, nuts, dairy, wheat and any of the any food products which were thought to cause allergy. 

I managed to get hold of Heather Fraser's book via the Internet Archive and I'm currently reading it online. Here is quote from the book:

The key phrase is "each society and every civilization creates its own diseases" struck a responsive chord in me. I thought of the Romans poisoning themselves with lead pipes and drinking vessels. The heavy metal poisoning causes by purgatives in the nineteenth century and now the autoimmune diseases exacerbated by vaccinations. I'll report further on the book once I finish it.