New Allergy Research: Kids Eat Cooked Egg, Overcome Egg Allergy Faster
Greek researchers fed 94 egg-allergic kids tiny amounts of cake (that contained egg, of course) over several months, increasing the amount of cake over time. After 6 months, over 95% of the children could eat eggs that hadn’t been cooked as thoroughly, and they exhibited no allergy symptoms.
To appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology

Which Came First: The Reflux or the Asthma?
Oh, I am so much more intimately acquainted with the asthma/stomach issues double-punch than I’d like to be. Lots of asthma patients have reflux, too, and while reflux can definitely trigger asthma flares, the research has never shown whether one causes the other. This study with mice suggests reflux may come first, since aspiration of gastric fluid can push the immune system over into the wonderful world of asthma. (Not that every reflux patient will go on to develop asthma, of course.)

Link Between Asthma Flares, Thunderstorms Found
From UGA and Emory University, downdrafts and heavy rain throw particles into the air and can *explode* pollen grains, possibly explaining the connection.

Uncontrolled Asthma in First Trimester Ups Birth Defect Risk
In fact, expectant mothers who flared in that crucial first trimester had babies with a 48% higher risk of congenital birth defects than asthma moms with no flares in this study of 4,300 pregnancies. If oxygen levels drop during an asthma flare it drops for both the mom and the fetus, which obviously hurts fetal development.

Add this to the *Don’t Blame the Parents for the Kid’s Asthma* and the *Information You Should Have for Future Pregnancies* files.
(This bit is actually from late spring/early summer, but somehow I missed it then.)

More on the EPA and Greenhouse Gases: It Would Be Sort of Funny if it Weren’t Actually True
Direct from the Huffington Post,

Environmental Protection Agency chief Stephen Johnson has declined to explain before Congress how a conclusion he made last year that global warming put the public in danger could lead to a decision not to regulate greenhouse gases.

Check out the rest of the article. (link above, story by Dina Cappiello)

Like Wikipedia, But for Health
Here’s a wiki for medical issues from Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School, among others. We’ll see the site live later this year, but get this: it will contain the same information about medical conditions that doctors see, so it certainly sounds promising.
(via The Health Care Blog)

Edited to add this sad news:

Randy Pausch of the Famous *Last Lecture* on YouTube, Dies of Cancer
Don’t miss the links at the end of that post, and please watch Pausch’s incredible lecture if you happened to miss it:

7 Mississippi Stations Drop Michael Savage
And this Charlottesville station, too.

And just for fun,

A Watermelon Keg for Labor Day Parties
How awesome is this? Sure, you can serve the usual vodka watermelon, but to turn it into an actual keg?

That’s forward thinking.
(via Serious Eats)

Filed under: Air Quality, Allergens, Asthma News & Research, Asthma Triggers, Children's Asthma, Children's Health, Friday Links