On January 8, USA Today reported that the Canadian Transportation Authority (CTA) has ordered Air Canada to begin steps to create “nut free zones” (NFZ) in their plane cabins to accommodate passengers with severe nut allergies. The CTA made their decision on the basis of complaints from 2 passengers following what were described as "inconsistent and difficult experiences" when they asked Air Canada to accommodate their nut allergies.
A Canadian newspaper, Toronto’s National Post, reported that the CTA gave Air Canada 30 days to give them a plan to create NFZ for each type of plane. Non-allergic passengers seated in these areas will be advised that they may only bring nut-free food stuffs on board and that they will only be served nut-free foods while in flight.
One of the 2 passengers who filed the complaints with the CTA felt that the ruling could have gone further. Another Canadian newspaper reported that the passenger wanted a global nut ban on all flights.
What do you think? Please feel free to post your own comments on this issue below. Topics and articles that you think would be of interest in our NBOP section and/or this blog can be sent to the JACI Editorial Office at jaci@njhealth.org.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
Biodiversity and allergy prevalence
Now that one section co-editor has given us a piece of his mind (see our previous post), we asked our other co-editor, Jean Bousquet, MD, PhD, Professor, Montpellier University, to tell us what he thinks is important for allergy/clinical immunology research and practice in 2010, both in Europe and the US:
“The United Nations declared 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity and launched the event with an appeal to the world to save our ecosystems (http://www.un.org/apps/news/). Saving our ecosystems is a topic very close to my heart; one that prompted me to commission an article on biodiversity and allergy prevalence for Allergy at the end of my tenure as editor-in-chief, and which was recently published (Haahtela, T., Allergy 2009, 64:1799-1803).
The commissioned article by Tari Haahtela of Helsinki University Hospital discusses how butterflies are used as indicators of environment change. Butterfly environments with a lot of diverse species are the healthiest, while environments with few butterfly species indicate disequilibrium. Connecting the increase of atopic disease with poorly stimulated immune systems in childhood, Dr. Haahtela suggests that urban environments have very low microdiversity, compared to non-urban environments, and that the immature immune system doesn’t get exposed to a sufficiently broad pathogen load. He uses the example of a study of butterfly diversity in Karelia, a geographic area that stretches across Finland and Russia. In Finland, the butterfly populations were isolated and made up of just a few species; in Russia, the butterflies were more diverse and widespread. The Finnish habitat was a developed area, and had higher atopy incidence; the Russian habitat was agricultural and overall atopy incidence was low. Dr. Haahtela discusses genetic research involving human populations from Karelia, focusing on single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with atopy. The research showed that alleles correlated with high risk for allergy in the Finnish developed region were protective in the Russian agricultural region. He suggests that the butterfly diversity model can be applied to the decreased micro-organismal diversity in the Finnish developed region, in that tolerance requires challenge by many micro-organisms and the loss of that diverse stimulation is the cause of our illness.”
We want to hear from you! Please feel free to post your own comments and/or predictions below. Topics and articles that you think would be of interest in our NBOP section and/or this blog can be sent to the JACI Editorial Office at jaci@njhealth.org.
“The United Nations declared 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity and launched the event with an appeal to the world to save our ecosystems (http://www.un.org/apps/news/). Saving our ecosystems is a topic very close to my heart; one that prompted me to commission an article on biodiversity and allergy prevalence for Allergy at the end of my tenure as editor-in-chief, and which was recently published (Haahtela, T., Allergy 2009, 64:1799-1803).
The commissioned article by Tari Haahtela of Helsinki University Hospital discusses how butterflies are used as indicators of environment change. Butterfly environments with a lot of diverse species are the healthiest, while environments with few butterfly species indicate disequilibrium. Connecting the increase of atopic disease with poorly stimulated immune systems in childhood, Dr. Haahtela suggests that urban environments have very low microdiversity, compared to non-urban environments, and that the immature immune system doesn’t get exposed to a sufficiently broad pathogen load. He uses the example of a study of butterfly diversity in Karelia, a geographic area that stretches across Finland and Russia. In Finland, the butterfly populations were isolated and made up of just a few species; in Russia, the butterflies were more diverse and widespread. The Finnish habitat was a developed area, and had higher atopy incidence; the Russian habitat was agricultural and overall atopy incidence was low. Dr. Haahtela discusses genetic research involving human populations from Karelia, focusing on single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with atopy. The research showed that alleles correlated with high risk for allergy in the Finnish developed region were protective in the Russian agricultural region. He suggests that the butterfly diversity model can be applied to the decreased micro-organismal diversity in the Finnish developed region, in that tolerance requires challenge by many micro-organisms and the loss of that diverse stimulation is the cause of our illness.”
We want to hear from you! Please feel free to post your own comments and/or predictions below. Topics and articles that you think would be of interest in our NBOP section and/or this blog can be sent to the JACI Editorial Office at jaci@njhealth.org.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Predictions for the next decade
Welcome to the JACI’s new News Beyond Our Pages (NBOP) blog. This blog is intended to supplement our monthly News Beyond Our Pages feature, which highlights breaking news and recently published articles of interest to the allergy/immunology community. To launch our new blog, we asked Marc Rothenberg, MD, PhD, NBOP section co-editor, and Director of Allergy/Immunology and Professor of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to give us his thoughts as we enter a new year and a new decade, and to offer up his predictions for allergy/clinical immunology research and practice during the next ten years:
“As we enter this new decade, our specialty has a special opportunity to truly advance care of patients suffering from a variety of diseases including allergy, immunodeficiency, autoimmunity and a host of inflammatory disorders.
The last decade was marked by deciphering of the human genome and the preliminary assessment of its clinical value. I predict that during the next decade, we will begin to truly use the breakthroughs associated with rapid genome sequencing to identify disease etiology, including the role of occult infections and microbiomes, in the diseases of interest to our specialty. This approach will lead to the design of patient and disease specific therapy.
I hope that our discipline can advance from “allergy shots” to directed tolerance induction protocols truly based immune based mechanisms. This is likely going to be first evident in the food allergy field.
Finally, I predict that biological therapeutics, such as anti-cytokine agents, will be proven to be effective for allergic diseases including asthma and will garner FDA approval.”
We want to hear from you! Please feel free to post your own comments and/or predictions below. Topics and articles that you think would be of interest in our NBOP section and/or this blog can be sent to the JACI Editorial Office at jaci@njhealth.org.
“As we enter this new decade, our specialty has a special opportunity to truly advance care of patients suffering from a variety of diseases including allergy, immunodeficiency, autoimmunity and a host of inflammatory disorders.
The last decade was marked by deciphering of the human genome and the preliminary assessment of its clinical value. I predict that during the next decade, we will begin to truly use the breakthroughs associated with rapid genome sequencing to identify disease etiology, including the role of occult infections and microbiomes, in the diseases of interest to our specialty. This approach will lead to the design of patient and disease specific therapy.
I hope that our discipline can advance from “allergy shots” to directed tolerance induction protocols truly based immune based mechanisms. This is likely going to be first evident in the food allergy field.
Finally, I predict that biological therapeutics, such as anti-cytokine agents, will be proven to be effective for allergic diseases including asthma and will garner FDA approval.”
We want to hear from you! Please feel free to post your own comments and/or predictions below. Topics and articles that you think would be of interest in our NBOP section and/or this blog can be sent to the JACI Editorial Office at jaci@njhealth.org.
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