Still Waiting for a Cure

The September 8, 2006 issue of Daily Mail featured an article entitled "Allergy Cure Just Three Years Away", suggesting that within the next three years, allergy specialists would have available a cure for allergies and asthma.

"A cure for allergies that affects millions including asthma and hayfever will be available within the next few years, experts have revealed.

Cutting-edge research from around the world will yield a treatment for hay fever by 2009, with a cure for asthma following shortly afterwards."

The theory, or rather prediction from the experts cited in the article, was treatments that prevent allergic reactions could be injected, swallowed or even dropped on the tongue. Allergic reactions are specifically caused by a small amount of protein in food or pollen grain being reacted to by the immune system, so the key to a cure would be in some way either preventing the body from reacting extremely to the foreign protein or to counter the allergen-protein in a way so as to separate it from your immune receptors.

As an allergy sufferer for all of my life, I had to learn that living with allergies meant treating the symptoms instead of the cause, which any doctor can tell you is often a less effective method of maintaining good health. I remember asking my doctor if there could be a cure, only to have him respond that "allergies are determined by your dna, so probably not". If this cure, which may be very well along if the proposed time line in the article is correct, becomes available, the theoretical 1 billion people in the world with allergies could finally be given a chance at being freed from their burden.

Unfortunately, this story has yet to be followed up, and the collective allergy sufferers of the world are left on the edges of our seats, tissues in hand, waiting for the good news. For the time being we will have to wait.