Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, was the first to record an allergic reaction to food. He observed that while cheese was a wholesome food for most people, some were made severely ill by eating it, even in very small amounts. Other Greek writers recorded violent reactions in certain individuals to eggs, honey, strawberries, nuts, oysters or other shellfish. While some of these cases may have been false food allergy (see p76) others were probably food allergy proper.
In 1921, two German scientists, Carl Prausnitz and Heinz Kustner, showed that something in the blood could reproduce such reactions. Kustner was sensitive to fish and developed urticaria, or nettle-rash, soon after eating it. A small amount of blood serum from Kustner was injected into Prausnitz’s arm. The next day fish extract was injected into the skin at the same spot and produced a red, itchy bump. When tested previously, there had been no such reaction. The two scientists gave the name reagin to the unknown component in the blood that had caused the reaction in Prausnitz.
The test became known as the Prausnitz-Kustner test, or passive transfer test, and was at one time used in diagnosing allergies. (The only reason it is no longer used is that there is a risk of transferring viral infections such as hepatitis and AIDS.) Progress thereafter was slow, and it was over 40 years before scientists could say exactly what ‘reagin’ was. The breakthrough came in the 1960s, the result of painstaking research work by a Japanese husband-and-wife team, Kimishige and Teruko Ishizaka, working in the United States. They discovered that reagin is a type of antibody, now known as IgE.
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