why is there an increase in alergies and such?

there is a recent news submissin on a girl who can not eat wheat products, and the fact that the rcc will not accomadate her needs.

my question is simple. why does there seem to be an increase in differant types and severities in alergies?

we have all seen that penuts and penut products for example have been OUTLAWED in schools. why is this? i understand that there are children that are deathly alergic to it. but why now?when i was in school, penut butter was amoung the most common foods eaten at lunch. now it can be considdered a potential weapon? i have a friend who works in daycare for example. she has developed a habbit of comeing home on friday afternoons to eat copious amounts of penuts and penut butter untill sunday afternoon. this is due to a policy in place that requires her to be penut free for at least 12 hours before work. aparently just the residual effects of penuts on her breath could be enough to kill some kids. wtf?

how can this happen? is it just that kids just died in the past or has the situation become more crittical? in my understanding, the simple explination is that for some reason the body decides that it dosn't like something, thus causeing an alergic reaction. as well the reaction can get stronger the more the body is subjected to such stimulus.

we also see an increase in athsmatic people. again when i was in school ther was mabe one kid in say 200. i only knew of one person suffering from that ailment untill just before high school. then i started to suffer from it myself. and i was the odd one out. this seemed to last untill i started smokeing. in fact it seems that the only time i realy suffer anymore is when i have been without a cigarette for a while. this was rather painfully realized when i was on a trip years ago where i was unable to smoke at all. then everytime i manage to quite for a day or two i become easily affected again. now this makes no sence from what i have been taught about smokeing but seems to happen to me anyway. i participate in armored combat in which i have been know to run arround for a couple hours at a time wearing well over 100lb of armer with no problem (and i do mean run). yet when i have not been smokeing even running in just shorts for a few minutes will tend to bring on an attack. weird, but i degress.

i can fully apriciate that things like athsma are probably caused by all the polution in the air we breath. but why are other alergies becomeing seemingly more commonplace and severe? i have often wondered if it may have something to do with all the innoculatins as well as antibiotics that are used so much more now? could it be that we are causeing the problem through such meds? or could it be something i have heard whispered about for several years that this is the result of more and more defects being passed down to our children? kinda like a photocopy of a photocopy, that is any "mistake" gets passed along along with any more new "mistakes", that will then be passed down to their coppies, and so on ect. in other words the breakdown of our dna, or imune systoms heredicaly.

there has to be something that contributes to this. alergies used to be fairly uncommon. oh people suffered from miner alergies, and a few even major alergies. but it certainly wasn't the widespread problem that it apears to be today. so why is it happening?

IMHO one reason for an increase in allergies is that parents do not let their children get exposed to things as much as they did in the past.

One reason that used to be given for children having allergies, when I was younger, was if they had been bottle fed more then Breast fed, that breast feeding would expose the child to more things they could build up immunity to. Allergies generally happen when your immune system attacks something you have been exposed to in the environment that it believes is a virus or bacteria. The purpose of getting allergy shots was so the body could get used to those imperfections in the environment by building up the proper immunity to them in increasing dosages.

Point is that I think back on things that I got into as a kid, and I would never expect a parent to allow their children to be exposed to such things today. Like catching frogs from a ditch next to a roadway by way of example. Maybe parents just got more protective of their children, or maybe they just realize the environment got more polluted or unsafe. It could be all the anti-bacterial cleaners that we use now. It might also just be that kids always had allergies, but there was not much you could do about it until the shots came out in the 70’s.

I agree with you about the athsma ordeal.

However the thing about peanuts in schools probably has more to do with the rise in lawsuits, and not allergies. A lot of candies, bar and other forms, have fine print warnings on the back now too like "THIS PRODUCT WAS MANUFACTURED IN A PLANT THAT PROCESSES PEANUTS."

I love peanut butter. The crunchier the better!

Regarding the increase in food allergies, could a possible explanation be all the increased use of pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals used now that were not maybe used as much 20-30 years ago? Maybe even increasing air pollution over the last 20-30 years has had some type of an effect on certain plants (i.e. peanut legumes), making them more "poisonous" over the years...

I kind of like that theory that kids today are more "protected" by their parents nowadays then they were back then, so like as already mentioned, todays' kids are not exposed to as many hazards when really young to develop a strong, and varied immune system...

Allergies have doubled in the last 20-30 years in almost every country when active studies have been conducted. Some evidence would tend to lead you to the conclusion that changes in life style have had what can be deemed a negative impact hence resulting in the increase. Lower rates of breast-feeding have been mentioned. Exposure to air pollution, particularly exposure to particulate matter from diesel fumes also contributes to the problem, as does cigarette smoke.

The reduction in exposure to parasitic disease in the developed world, which leaves one arm of the immune system with nothing to do except react against harmless allergens. The "hygiene hypothesis", whereby exposure to less infection early in life increases the risk of developing allergies as we age.

I also feel that the exessive amounts of chemicals that are pumped in to the food chain must have an impact on our immune system.