Allergy means ‘activity change’. It also known as hypersensitive reaction and happens when body defense system reacts to foreign substance that enters the body through the skin, lung, swallowed or pricked. This reaction actually does not need to happen. It often happened to those who have family’s history that suffer allergy.
Allergic reaction may be mild or serious and happen in a twinkling of an eye or few minutes after exposed allergen, but some possibly could happen after several days or few weeks. Anaphylaxis is a very serious allergic reaction and can happen abruptly within a few minutes after being exposed to the allergen. It brings to anaphylaxis shock and can cause death within 15 minute if not getting medical treatment.
The term ‘allergy’ was created by Vienna pediatrician, Clemens von Pirquet in 1906 after he made his note that some of his patients are hypersensitive to normally harmless entities such as dust, pollen, or some particular food. Pirquet names this phenomenon as ‘allergy’, from Greek allos words mean “other” and ergon mean “work”.
History
Historically, all of hypersensitive forms (hypersensitivity) are classified as allergies, and all thought caused by an improper activation antibody class named Immunoglobulin E (IgE) – Teruka and Kimishige Ishizaka make among the first to isolate and explained IgE in year 1960s.
Then, it became clear that some other disease mechanism was implicated, with usual relationship between these varying hypersensitivities there is an activation disturbing immune system in a way or other. A new classification scheme have been designed by P Gell and R Coombs to reflect what then re-named again as hypersensitivity reactions (hypersensitivities). Word “allergy” are afterwards limited to type I hypersensitivities, which are caused by the classic IgE mechanism.
Causes
- Plants
- Food
- Drugs
- Pollen
- Bee sting
- Bite
Common allergies:
- Allergic Rhinitis (Allergic breathing)
- Food Allergies
- Allergies to Medications
- Allergic Conjunctivitis, Eye Allergies
