Have Egg Allergy? You May Still Be Candidate For Flu Vaccines, Says Allergist

As flu season got underway this fall, Dr. Catherine Monteleone, an allergist, noticed that her office started to receive an unusually high number of calls from people with egg allergy. They previously had avoided flu vaccines because of their sensitivity to eggs. This year, with all the attention being paid to the novel H1N1 influenza, those patients want to be protected against flu, and they contacted her to find out if they are candidates for inoculation. "Seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccines are produced in chicken embryos eggs so people who have egg allergy generally avoid them, " Monteleone, an associate professor of medicine at the UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, explained.

Sweet! Sugared Polymer A New Weapon Against Allergies And Asthma

Scientists at Johns Hopkins and their colleagues have developed sugar-coated polymer strands that selectively kill off cells involved in triggering aggressive allergy and asthma attacks. Their advance is a significant step toward crafting pharmaceuticals to fight these often life-endangering conditions in a new way. For more than a decade, a team led by Bruce S. Bochner, M.D., director of the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has studied a unique protein known as Siglec-8. This protein, whose name is an acronym for Sialic Acid-binding, Immunoglobulin-like LECtin number 8, is present on the surfaces of a few types of immune cells, including eosinophils, basophils and mast cells.