Cross contamination is really big issue in allergy families. I often feel like we live in an allergy minefield. Generally if Little B has a reaction (depending on that reaction, for example, soy makes him bleed internally) we know what has caused it.
But then we have days or in this case weeks, where Little B shows obvious signs of allergy (for him) and we quite literally have no idea what is causing it. Recently Little B had allergy shiners, looked very pale and unwell, was sleeping poorly and had really weird stools and we had no idea why. Nothing had changed in his diet or life.
So then you start to clutch at straws – is environmental?, growth spurt?, a new allergen?, cross contamination?....I could quite literally go on for pages and pages.
But then Little B started to bleed from his bowels and we knew that we had a serious problem on our hands. After numerous discussions with his paed gastro, we were resigned that we may have to begin the strict elimination diet all over again looking for new allergens. This was devastating to me as it would have been literally like taking 200 steps backward to 16 months ago.
Until we discovered that the rice milk we use is now cross contaminated with soy. They used to make the milks on different lines and now in the name of cost cutting and saving dollars, they make both milks on the same line. Which is sheer hell for allergy families like ours.
We have removed this milk from Little B’s diet and his health has begun to improve. Almost immediately his stomach and bowels settled down and he began sleeping again.
Cross contamination is hard enough at the best of times without companies banging soy into everything (but that’s another post altogether).
No comments:
Post a Comment