I was reminded last week by an excellent post on Ruth Holroyd’s What Allergy? blog of the Pholcodine issue which, 25 years after it was first discussed, has still not been resolved in the UK. Pholcodine is a drug that is to be found in a wide range of cough medicines. Unfortunately pholcodine has a similar molecular structure to the muscle relaxing drugs which are routinely given to patients about to undergo operations. If that patient has recently (within the last year) had an allergic reaction to pholcodine they could easily react to a muscle relaxant administered prior to an operation. Acc ..read more

We are in the middle of the 2023 FreeFrom Food Awards* judging season and Thursday was the day for dairy free/vegan cheese. I was not present at the judging so I have no idea what the judges thought of the entries. But I did find a whole stack of remains in my fridge after everyone had gone home. Without wishing to bore you with my recollections, when I first got involved with freefrom food back in the last century, a block of dairy free cheese bore a much closer resemblance to a chunk of polystyrene than it did to a hunk of cheddar. But over the years, matters have improved dramatically – tha ..read more

Back in 2021 I did a short post to alert readers to World Ocean Day and directed readers to a site run by Coty Perry detailing the horror show that is our overfished oceans. Over the last 18 months Coty has done a massive upgrade on his site – and renamed it anglers.com.  (Image above courtesy of anglers.com) The site tells you everything that you could want to know about fishing for pleasure – ‘a website built by anglers for anglers. We’re your friends and family’. But they also have a very comprehensive section on commercial over fishing – when the breeding stock of an area becomes so ..read more

In a recent BSACI on line symposium Professor Stephen Holgate called for urgent action to tackle the environmental causes of the global explosion in allergy cases: the loss of biodiversity, pollution, diet and urbanisation. This followed on from his keynote speech at the two day workshop organised by the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation last autumn in which he cited recent studies showing that “livestock farming and other aspects of the rural environment clearly protect against the development of allergy”.  These included a comparative study of farming practices in the Amish and Hutte ..read more

Very long term readers of this blog will remember that over ten years ago I went through a few years when I was quite seriously electro sensitive. In other words I reacted badly to electromagnetic radiation – the lifeblood of our phones, our computers and our on line inter-connected world. Spending time in a ‘normal’ environment, heavily saturated with wifi, telephone masts, GPS satellite beams, smart meters and blue tooth, not to mention Alexa and her fellows had she been around,  would exhaust me, give me an aching chest, and an upset stomach, I would feel uncharacteristially depressed ..read more

You may remember that back in October I posted about the case brought by Action Against 5G against the Secretaries of State for Health and Social Care, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Digital Culture Media and Sport. Their claim was that the government’s actions in authorising and promoting 5G are a breach of human rights in that they are failing to protect the public from the health risks of 5G technology. After various legal to-ings and fro-ings Action Against 5G’s appeal came to court on Monday and Tuesday of this week, headed up by the leading KC Michael Mansfield widely known ..read more

Tragedy changes lives but devastating though tragic events may be they are also the spur to extraordinary achievements – and that cannot be more true than of the Ednan-Laperouse family. There can be few people in the allergy world who have not have heard of Natasha, the 15 year old daughter of Nadim and Tanya Ednan-Laperouse who died in 2016 after eating a Pret a Manger baguette containing unlabelled sesame seeds to which she was allergic. Indeed, thanks to the tireless work of Tanya and Nadim there are very few people in world outside allergy who have not heard of Natasha. Since her death an ..read more

‘I saw a horrendous amount of road kill this morning,’ a friend commented as he arrived for lunch on on New Year’s Day. ‘I wonder why.’ I wondered why too – and then it occurred to me – fireworks. Animals scared out of their layers and onto the roads by the cacophany of yet another fireworks display. It is not that I want to stop people having fun. But, when light displays are now so inventive, artistic and truly spectacular, why are we still so wedded to fireworks – not only a disaster for the environment but deeply anti social? Environmental damage and air pollution from fireworks Firework ..read more

The 2023 FreeFrom Food Awards are now open. And if you were wondering – yes, they are opening a bit later than usual this year to allow us to line up our new Easter and Christmas awards with the festivities that they celebrate. So as of this year: 3rd January 2023 Opening of both Easter Awards and the main FreeFrom Food Awards 9th February 2023 Announcement of Easter Awards winners May 2023 Announcement of main awards winners September – November 2023 Christmas Awards Why you should enter The FFFA entrant, shortlisted or winners’ logos are instantly recognisable and are trusted by freefrom c ..read more

If so, Dr Damien Downing in the latest post from Orthomolecular.org thinks you should be feeding yourself, and/or your children, Vitamin C. Plenty of it. And ideally combined with Vitamin D3, magnesium and zinc. This is because orthomolecular medicine believes that if you feed the body the nutrients that it needs it will not get ill.  ‘Orthomolecular medicine describes the practice of preventing and treating disease by providing the body with optimal amounts of substances which are natural to the body.’ Based on the works of two time Nobel Prize laureate and molecular biologist Dr Linus ..read more