blood transfusions can cause alergies?

i found this rather interesting story. it seems that having receiving blood products can give you the allergies of the donor.

An eight-year-old boy developed an anaphylactic allergy to fish and peanuts after receiving a blood transfusion, a rare case that illustrates why parents and doctors should be aware of the possibility following a transfusion, Canadian researchers say. The boy had no history of allergies. He received blood products including plasma and chemotherapy as part of his treatment for medulloblastoma, a type of brain tumour.

In Monday's issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Dr. Julia Upton of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and her team describe how the boy experienced anaphylactic symptoms including swelling of the lips, facial redness, throat discomfort and fatigue within 10 minutes of eating salmon, a food he'd eaten often before without having an allergic reaction.

Doctors suspected analyphylaxis from transfer of an allergy antibody in blood plasma that can react against allergens in rare cases, rather than the typical scenario where a person makes the allergy antibodies themselves.

In the boy's case, four days after the fish reaction, he experienced an allergic reaction to peanuts minutes after eating a chocolate peanut butter cup. Again, he'd often eaten peanut products before.

www.cbc.ca...

now they do say it is temporary and should go away in a few months, as has apparently happened in this instance. they also say that this is a rare occurrence "less than one in a million". this being only the second reported in the country in a decade with the first being reported in 1919. i feel this is likely wrong. first off how many would even suspect that new allergies would be caused like this? i know my family never suspected this could be the case when my mother developed severe and deadly allergies to shellfish (bad enough even regular table salt would cause a reaction, guess where the iodine in it typically comes from) and mushrooms after similar medical treatments. in fact she even inquired about the sudden onset of the allergies (she ate both shellfish and mushrooms no problem before) with her doctor only to be told something like "these things just happen". so i would suspect most cases are never recorded since they are never suspected or looked into. not to mention people not immediately getting into something they are newly allergic to before it has gone away, or enough time has passed they wouldn't even think to connect to blood products if the doctor even considered it in the first place. so who really even knows the real rate of occurrence. i also have to wonder about it going away since my mothers allergies lasted until she died years later.

i have to wonder about their not being concerned about this being enough of an issue to stop taking blood from people with allergies over. they say that being less than "one in a million" thing that it would hurt the blood supply to much. yet at the same time people who travel to certain countries are banned from giving blood for fear of that small chance they picked up something while there. as well as people who have gotten "false positive" test results for things like HIV are banned for life with threat of arrest to give blood. even when they tell the person not to worry as further testing shows they are 100% disease free, yet they are still banned for life to give blood. so they DO in fact stop people from giving blood based on slight chances and even no chance there is a problem. so why no concern here?

something else worth thinking about in regards to this. many people have been wondering about the seeming rise in allergies in the population, especially the extreme sensitivity that seems to be on the rise (like just smelling peanut butter on someone's breath possibly causing death). could it be partially from vaccinations, at least some of which use blood products passing these allergies? or even possibly making allergies worse?

If the donor's got complement or adaptive antibodies to a particular substance, you'll react to it until it degrades. Your body won't continue to produce it, though.

And, no, that doesn't come from vaccines. It's from plasma.

I'd rather look at it this way......

Bleeding to death causes....Death.

I actually read an article about that a while back. It seems to be a real issue for some people. It is only temporary from what I read and if you need blood, you need blood. So that I would consider to be an allowable risk.

a reply to: generik

It is very rare but it has happened before, I have heard of a couple of cases where patients had blood transfusion and then developed food allergies. Hospitals always need blood donors and they will not discourage people with known allergies from donating.