And so within 30 minutes, he was dead on arrival at the hospital. ![]() So often, people can go into cardiac arrest during an anaphylactic event.Īnd unfortunately for my father, he was sitting in the cab of his car the entire time, sitting upright. And it also dilates your blood vessels, which ends up crashing your blood flow to your heart. ![]() So his neck started to swell up, so he couldn't get air that way either. So my dad started to have trouble breathing. It can constrict the muscles around your lungs. It is one of the reasons you get mucus in your nasal passages. It's just a little compound that cells send out when they're damaged or stressed, and that sends every other cell around it into a similar pattern.Īnd so before long, my father's cells were just emitting histamine, and histamine does a lot of things in your body. One of a few cells in his neck noticed that the bee venom was in his neck, didn't appreciate that - most of our cells don't - and sent out cell signals called histamine. So basically, an allergic reaction - an anaphylactic reaction is a little bit like - you've seen the nuclear reaction examples of the ping pong ball. The bee ended up stinging him right in the neck, and that set a whole cascade of biological events in process. And a bee, just on its daily pollen-gathering trajectory, accidentally flew into his window. And so he had the window rolled down because he happened to be an inveterate smoker. And my father was in his car with his girlfriend at the time and had stopped at a stop sign. It was 1996, which is going to be important in a second. You open the book with a story about your father. Thanks for having me.ĭAVIES: You know, you take us on quite a journey through the world of allergies and how they are changing. Her new book is "Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies In A Changing World." Theresa MacPhail, welcome to FRESH AIR. ![]() in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco. She researches and writes about global health, biomedicine and disease. Theresa MacPhail is an associate professor of science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. While there's new science on the causes of allergic reactions, effective treatments are hard to come by and expensive when one shows promise. For decades, they were thought to mainly afflict people who were nervous, anxious or temperamental. MacPhail found the causes of allergies to be complex and often misunderstood. There are allergies to airborne irritants, food allergies and skin allergies. Some allergic reactions are a nuisance - the congestion and burning eyes that come with a high pollen count - and some are deadly, like anaphylaxis that can follow a bee sting, something MacPhail has had personal experience with in her own family. Estimates are that 30 to 40% of the world's population now have some form of allergy. In the U.S., nut allergies in children, hospital admissions for asthma and prescriptions for EpiPens, which treat extreme allergic reactions, have all tripled in recent years. Her book is about allergies, which are a growing challenge for humanity as our environment changes. She stopped taking daily showers and changing her sheets as often, along with eating more natural food and making sure to get enough sleep and exercise. ![]() When my guest, author and medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail, finished researching and writing her new book, she made some lifestyle changes.
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