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Progress on Allergies
| Article
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13748 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1988 |
3,016 Words |
| Author
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Michael Woods
Michael Woods, a contributing editor for THE WORLD & I, has
received numerous science-writing awards. |
House-dust mites, wool, milk, eggs, strawberries, feathers, cat fur, chocolate, shrimp, lobster, sunlight, heat, cold, peanuts, cosmetics, nickel, plant pollen, nuts, beans, penicillin.
The list sounds curiously disjointed--a group of seemingly unrelated substances, most of which appear totally harmless. But for an estimated one-half of the world's population it constitutes a veritable rogues' gallery of discomfort, misery, sickness, disability, and sometimes death.
For these are among the agents of allergy, an ancient disease that continues to exact a massive but little-recognized toll on society. Allergy lacks the glamour and mystery of new diseases caused by exotic microbes because it is caused by the familiar substances of everyday life. It lacks the immediacy of heart disease and cancer, the foremost causes of death and disability in the industrialized world, because it kills few, perhaps only tens of thousands a year, worldwide. Yet allergy ranks among the most important of all human ailments, one that causes periodic or year-round misery for hundreds of millions of people.
Allergies have plagued mankind since earliest recorded history. The allergic reaction has been recognized since the third millennium B.C., when the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung warned about adverse reactions to certain foods. Hieroglyphics in the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh indicate that the king died in 2641 B.C. an allergic reaction to a wasp or hornet sting. The early Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen both wrote about allergic reactions.
After centuries of effort, mankind finally has begun to understand the true nature of allergy. There have been stunning insights into the basic biological mechanisms that cause hay fever, asthma, skin rashes, and a host of other allergic conditions. Riding the coattails of the boom in research in the closely related field of immunology and benefiting from parallel research on the prevention of rejection of organ transplants, allergy researchers have answered a question that has taunted physicians for centuries: What is allergy?
The answer, stated with elegant simplicity a few years ago by Paul Buisseret, then of Louisiana State University, is that "Allergy is a disorder of the immune system. It is immunity gone wrong."
This understanding of the biochemical and cellular components of allergy has brought mankind
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