SAN DIEGO, March 5 (UPI) -- Parents should avoid cooking certain foods in the
home because the food vapors can trigger serious reactions in children who have
both food allergies and asthma.
"The danger only involves children with a clear history of food allergy and
asthma together," Dr. Neil Golder, a pediatric allergist at St. Mary's Hospital,
London, said Sunday.. He said certain children who are allergic to items such as
fish should be kept out of the kitchen when the food is prepared and cooked, but
he said that to err on the side of safety, the foods should not be cooked in the
home, "certainly not in some kind of closed environment."
"It's quite important that we realized that we are not talking about all
asthmatics or all people with food allergies... those would be huge numbers,"
Golder said, adding that often the food that triggers an attack in a sensitive
child is still an item that other family members like to eat, so it is still
served and prepared.
In a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy,
Asthma and Immunology in San Diego, Golder and colleagues considered that
inhalation of aerosolized food allergen might be responsible for some of the
asthma attacks seen among sensitive children.
They investigated reports of 12 attacks that appeared to stem from inhaling the
cooking vapors of restricted foods -- fish, chickpeas, milk, buckwheat, lentils
and egg. Six of the children underwent tests to determine if the vapors were
responsible for the attacks.
Within an hour, Golder said four out of six children developed positive
reactions to the food being cooked and two also had late phase reductions in
lung function after four to eight hours. The co-author of the study, Dr. Graham
Roberts, also of St. Mary's, said reactions to cooking food have been discussed
in regard to occupational hazards but "have not been well described in the home
in the medical literature."
Dr. Michael Young, an allergist at Children's Hospital, Boston, said he has only
heard of anecdotal reports of allergic and asthma attacks triggered by cooking
vapors, outside of reports of fish and shellfish."
