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Ah-choo!
When the Family Pet Makes Your Child Sneeze
By Shel Franco
Itchy and watery eyes, a stuffy or runny nose, sneezing and wheezing all add up to one miserable child. More than likely, this miserable child suffers from allergies. For some children, allergic reactions are caused by trees, mold and food. For others, the culprit is the family pet.
Each year, hoards of children are subject to allergy testing. "Allergy to pets is diagnosed by clinical history," says Marek Pienkowski, MD, Ph.D, an allergist and immunologist, in Knoxville, Tenn. Doctors look for "symptoms consistent with allergic disease with exposure to animals and allergy testing, either by the so-called 'skin test' or the Radioallergosorbent (RAST) blood test."
For animal owners, when the test results are positive for pet allergies, life as they know it comes to a screeching halt.
Elissa Sonnenberg, of Cincinnati, Ohio, watched her oldest son go through a 3-hour skin prick test to determine the source of his allergies. "Do you have pets?" the allergist asked. "We don't," said Sonnenberg. "Don't get any," she was told.
It seems like a simple solution. But by the time an allergy is detected, pets may already be full-fledged members of the family.
"By the time we knew it was the animals making [my daughter] sick, we had a dog, two cats, a hamster and a rabbit," says Jess Boetig, of Philadelphia, Pa. Because of the number of animals and the severity of the allergy, her family needed to find new homes for the pets. "It was really hard on us," says Boetig. "We knew it was necessary, but it was still hard."
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