Unborn babies wanted for allergy trials

By SIMON COLLINS, science reporter

Doctors are looking for unborn babies to test a new "probiotic" treatment to combat a worldwide surge of allergic diseases.

Researchers at the Auckland and Wellington medical schools are recruiting 225 pregnant women in each city who will agree to feed their babies a special daily mix of bacteria from the day they are born until they turn two.

The payoff is that the treatment - if it works - will break the cycle of parents passing allergies on to their children.

Wellington mother Rebecca Leach, whose baby Joseph started on the bacterial mix soon after he was born last Wednesday, said she agreed to take part because she is asthmatic.

"If it's going to help him not to have the asthma and allergy problems I've had, I see that as being really positive," she said.

The new treatment is the reverse of antibiotics, which kill the bacteria that cause ailments such as pneumonia.

Probiotics actually put extra bacteria into the body, on the theory that allergies and other health problems may be due to the body's mix of bacteria becoming unbalanced. So far, probiotics have been used mainly in yoghurts.

Associate Professor Peter Black of Auckland University said modern diet and antibiotics had completely changed the mix of bacteria in the guts of people in rich countries such as New Zealand in the past 30 or 40 years.

Scientists believe this at least partly explains why the rate of allergic diseases has doubled in these countries in the past 20 years.

Surveys show that 10 per cent of adult New Zealanders now take treatments for asthma, 10 to 20 per cent of babies get eczema, and one-third of 12 and 13-year-olds have had episodes of wheezing in the past year.

New Zealand has one of the highest asthma rates in the world and also has above-average rates of eczema.

"There is debate about what it is about the Western lifestyle," Professor Black said.

"One is that we live in a clean environment and the immune system responds inappropriately to the lack of exposure to bacteria. The other is diet."

He said high milk consumption in countries such as New Zealand did not seem to increase allergies, and genetically modified foods in the United States were too new to account for the worldwide allergy explosion over two decades.

But people who ate lots of fruit and vegetables had fewer allergy problems.

A Finnish study which gave probiotics to babies for their first six months in 2000 cut eczema rates by 50 per cent.

The New Zealand study will give babies one of two bacteria which have been isolated by Fonterra - lactobacillus and bifidobacterium - every day for two years.

Pregnant women will also take the bacteria in tablets for five weeks before their babies are due.

Once their babies are born, parents mix a capsule-worth of the bacteria with about 2ml of breast milk and squirt the mixture into their babies' mouths.

"It's like giving them a medicine," Mrs Leach said. "It's recommended that you don't introduce a bottle till eight weeks if you're breastfeeding."

Later the babies can be fed the mixture with a bottle, and after weaning, the contents of the capsule can be spooned on to their food.

VOLUNTEERS SOUGHT

Expectant parents who have had asthma, eczema or hay fever and wish to consider enrolling their babies may ring Susie Lester or Claire Arandjus at Auckland University (09 373-7999) or Bridgette Jones or Stephanie Malloy at the Wellington Medical School (0800 000-323)