Food danger means vigilance

The slightest contact with ordinary foods can be deadly for some people. REBECCA WALSH reports.

Samara Calvert is a healthy 4-year-old, but if she touches raw egg, she could die.

Peanuts and dairy products are just as dangerous.

When she was being driven home from the supermarket one day, a cracked egg in the shopping was enough to cause her eyes to swell shut.

Last weekend, she accidentally rubbed chocolate milk in her eyes. Within minutes one of them was puffed up.

"My eye went funny. I had some medicine and I waited for a long time and then it got better," the preschooler explains.

Samara is one of the estimated 12 per cent of New Zealand children who suffer from a food allergy. Foods that are harmless to most of us can spark reactions so severe in Samara that she goes into anaphylactic shock, requiring an immediate injection of adrenaline.

Most of the time, antihistamine medicine stops the reaction before it gets too bad.

Still, contact with foods she is allergic to can burn her skin and cause bleeding. She is likely to start coughing and have trouble breathing, she goes blue around the lips, breaks out in hives and feels sick. Her skin is often irritated by eczema.

Samara's mother, Kathryn, gives as an example an incident last year when they were at her parents' house.

"I was making something with eggs when she fell over.

"I hadn't washed my hands and patted her on the head to say, 'You'll be all right', and 20 minutes later she had no nose [because her face was so swollen].

"She had to have adrenaline in hospital."

Samara's allergies showed from an early age but Mrs Calvert says doctors did not know at first what was wrong.

A family history of allergies is a strong predictor of a child's having a greater tendency to them. Mrs Calvert's mother has severe asthma and her husband, Kevin, gets hay fever.

When she was born, Samara was covered in eczema. At four months the infant formula she spat out burned her face and caused bleeding. She then developed an allergy to soya formula and now drinks rice milk.

"It's pretty scary and difficult because a lot of GPs haven't seen this before," Mrs Calvert says.

"She can sit in a supermarket trolley and have a reaction because some kid's had an icecream in there."

Having a child with a severe allergy means being extra vigilant and more "hands-on".

When Samara goes to birthday parties, she takes her own party pack and Mrs Calvert goes with her. If the family go out for dinner, she phones the restaurant to see if they can make a meal for Samara.

But she says she is more relaxed than many parents, who will not allow their children to see the things they are allergic to.

"My major problem is making people understand this is not just hives ... You can talk to parents and they say they understand.

"To be honest, I haven't let her play anywhere else yet. The other kids come to our house, it's safer that way. I wouldn't want any parent to go through a reaction. It's really horrible, it happens so quickly."

Birkenhead Kindergarten, where Samara goes in the mornings, provides only fruit and vegetables for morning tea to protect Samara. Most parents were happy to make the change.

Staff have also been trained in how to use an epi-pen (adrenaline injection) and for signs that the 4-year-old may be having a reaction.

Mrs Calvert says Samara and the family have learned to live with her allergies, and she is grateful her daughter does not have a gluten or wheat allergy, which would eliminate many more foods from her diet.

Samara, who enjoys mince and rice, can still eat many foods and rarely gets sick.

But Mrs Calvert says the cost can be huge - from medications to the $4 a day for rice milk.

An epi-pen, which is not subsidised by the Government, costs more than $100 and can be used only once. Samara has had adrenaline twice.

Luckily for the Calverts, living in Auckland means it is easier to see the country's few skin specialists - although it is another cost the Calverts have to pay.

nzherald.co.nz/health