Are too many babies being diagnosed with cows' milk allergy?

Inside Health

BBC

Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 575 Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rashes, a runny nose and weird poos are all common in babies. Parents are sometimes told these symptoms mean their baby is allergic to cows milk and are prescribed low allergy formula or advised to avoid dairy if they are breastfeeding. Marijke Peters cut dairy out of her diet to try and help the gut problems her new baby Eva was having - but it made no difference and she's still trying to find out why she has blood in her poo.

Dr Robert Boyle sees babies with allergies in his clinic at St Mary's hospital in London. Those with a cows' milk protein allergy can safely drink low-allergy formula milk - but Dr Boyle thinks that more than the expected 1% of babies are being diagnosed with the allergy. So he looked at the number of prescriptions for these specialised formula milks dispensed in the UK, Norway and Australia. In the UK he says that ten times the number you'd expect to see are prescribed.

Professor Paula Moynihan who's Director of Food and Health at the University of Adelaide says these formula milks could pose a risk to children's teeth because they contain different sugars than the type found in milk - which bacteria in the mouth can feed on, making it more acidic and potentially damaging the teeth. She says that any babies given the dairy-free formulas should have their teeth brushed twice a day with a fluoride toothpaste and start seeing a dentist as soon as the first tooth appears.

Dr Margaret McCartney explains how long-Covid patients are going to extraordinary lengths to try unproven treatments in the hope that they will alleviate their symptoms. We hear how an investigation by the British Medical Journal uncovered how a special type of blood filtering called apheresis and hyperbaric oxygen therapy - costing thousands of pounds - are offered to long-Covid patients in European clinics but there is no evidence that they will help them. Margaret recommends instead signing up for NHS trials investigating potential treatments in a regulated way.

Gout is incredibly painful but many adults diagnosed with the condition aren't taking the recommended medication a year after they were told they had it. Dr Mark Russell from Kings College hospital in London found that only a third of people with gout were taking medication to help lower urate levels in their blood which can turn into crystals in the joints and organs like the kidneys if it is too high.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Greg Jenna and good news, Your Dead to Me is back for a new series. Here we go. Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Marybeard and Patton Oswald. I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire. We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dor-Leon with Tom Allen. I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and being very quickly knocked down. And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Rihalina. I'm excited. You're dead to me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Hello there and welcome to the Inside Health podcast with me, James Gallagher. I'll be honest, on this week's pod, we're having a bit of a Goldilocks moment because we're considering if too many babies are being treated for milk allergies and too few adults are getting treatment to prevent gout. And when it comes to on COVID, are people now so desperate they're wasting their life savings on unproven treatments?
0:55.2	Well, we'll get to the bottom of all of it in the next half hour.
0:57.9	But let's start with baby milk allergies, and new mum, Maraca Peters.
1:04.3	Hi, Maraca.
1:05.5	Hi, how are you doing?
1:06.6	I'm not too bad.
1:07.9	Remind me how old's Eva now?
1:09.5	Eva is four and a half months. So you're
1:12.1	getting so much sleep. So much sleep. I'm like never getting very much sleep. And how's she
1:18.0	getting on? She's totally fine. She's really happy and kind of fun doing these things every day.
1:24.4	But she does have this sort of minor problem of blood in her poo,
1:29.2	which is a bit disconcerting. So what do doctors think is going on? So we discovered it a couple of
1:34.1	months ago. We had no idea what it was and we, you know, got sent to hospital and people
1:40.3	checked it out. And we were told by multiple doctors that it was a cow's milk protein allergy, which meant that they wanted me to cut out dairy from my diet to see if it went away. And that seems to be like the kind of standard answer that you're given when your baby presents with blood in the store. So you're breastfeeding in the theory is that it's crossing over. Your diet's getting into the breast milk and that's where the allergy is coming from. Exactly. I eat so much cheese. I drink so much milk that it's getting into my breast milk,
2:08.6	erasizing the lining of her gut somewhere and causing it to leak a little bit.
2:13.4	Okay. So what have you had to do? The first thing I did was cut out cows milk dairy, so I thought, great, I can still eat feta and
2:20.1	eat goat's butter, which it turns out is a thing. And then I found out it's actually the same
2:25.8	protein in all dairy, so I had to cut everything out. And I did that for about six weeks,
2:31.8	and it made absolutely no difference whatsoever.
2:34.6	Okay. So now what do you have to do?
2:37.2	Now I've been told I can eat cheese again, yay, but I should cut out eggs and soy.
2:43.1	Because perhaps it's a protein in those foods that might be causing this irritation.
	...

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