Immediately following the birth of a baby, could a portion of the placenta not be frozen, tagged and sent to a lab for allergy testing? The allergies developed later in life are, to my knowledge, not generally the ones causing death. It's that first bee sting, or peanut or what have you that a child is exposed to with out knowing that there will be an allergic reaction that results in fatalities, so why not mandatory...er optional placental testing?-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Sep 09 2006 Sendra's link as a link. http://www.abc.net....9/04/22/2549445.htmYou can add one by clicking on "link", down there vvvv [jutta, May 04 2009] you know what mandatory means, don't you?-- po, Sep 09 2006 Ah, yes. I will swap it for "optional".-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Sep 09 2006 Allergies are caused by the immune system over-reacting to certain stimuli. New born babies have no immune system until a few months of age - until then, their equivalent is antibodies from the mother's breast milk in the form of colostrum. Sorry, but from what I know - it wouldn't work.-- fridge duck, Sep 09 2006 My sis has a peanut allergy. It develops with exposure, so it produced a noticeable reaction only by the time she was 4 years old or so.-- david_scothern, Sep 09 2006 I've just read (seriously) that lice may regulate the immune system. An experiment was done comparing the immune systems of wild mice vs cage bred experimental mice. those mice that were infested with lice had healthier immune systems. I can't work out how to add this link to the article so I'll break it up here http://www.abc.net.au/science /articles/2009/04 /22/2549445.htm-- Sendra, Apr 28 2009 Fridge has made a very good point. This won't work. And apart from anything else, how you do test to see whether a placenta is developing a blotchy skin in reaction to an allergen.-- MaxwellBuchanan, May 02 2009 it's the tragic lack of understanding about the actual function of the immune system that is causing an increase in fatal allergies. What part of the frozen (dead) placenta would you test for an allergic reaction?-- WcW, May 02 2009 Sorry guys. This one was more of a question than a real notion. I did search a bit and found this;
//IgG is the major antibody of secondary responses. It is active against viruses, bacteria, and fungi, the only immunoglobin that crosses the placenta and fixes complement by the classic pathway//
I take that to mean that no other allergens can cross through the placenta and that all tests but those would be useless.
<side note> A search for "placental alergy testing" results in three hits, two for this idea, and one for a site that should not have the word halfbakery associated with it.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, May 04 2009 Yeah, spam and porn spam websites sometimes get their material from other legitimate text sources - such as RSS feeds of blogs - and then intersperse that with their own keywords to make themselves look legitimate to search engines.-- jutta, May 04 2009 random, halfbakery