Helo am Claudia Hammond and a very warm welcome to the evidence from the BBC.

This series is produced in collaboration with Welcome Collection and we're here in the reading

room in London with a live audience. Now today we're going to explore allergies,

something that affects around one in five of us globally and more than one in three of us

in high income countries. And I wonder from the audience here how many people here have

an allergy. Now since a show of hands isn't brilliant on the radio I'm wondering if you could

cheer if you have an allergy or maybe booing would be more appropriate. So if you have an allergy

please boo loudly. Oh I'm sorry that's quite a few of you and now could you boo if you know

someone else who has an allergy? Yeah that that that seemed like I'm almost everyone there.

So that is that is a lot of people. Now obviously you have chosen to come along today

but you've probably heard a lot in the news about the rise in food allergies as well as in

asthma and skin allergies and of the very serious and very tragic cases where this has resulted in

someone's death. Now far more people do have allergies now than 50 years ago and you might assume

that this increase is going to continue but our allergies still on the rise and our things

only going to get worse. It turns out it's all a bit more complicated and that's what we're

going to unpick today and later on we'll be looking at the best ways of preventing and

accurately diagnosing allergies and at the latest cutting-edge research which just suggests

some possible cures on the horizon and to help me I have a panel of world leading experts on

the topic so let me introduce you to our panel for the first part of our show. Paul Turner is

consultant pediatric allergist at St Mary's Hospital in London and leads the food allergy

desensitisation programme there as well as researching severe allergic reactions to food.

Castan Floor is professor of dermatology at St John's Institute of Dermatology at King's

...