The parents of a two-year-old girl with allergies so severe she has to try new food in hospital car parks have called for more specialist clinics to help people with allergies. Gemma Whatling and her husband Nick discovered their daughter Seren had allergies when she was three months old due to widespread eczema and cuts that were hard to get under control. Quietly adding new foods as suggested by a doctor, she had an anaphylactic shock at eight months old after eating cow’s milk.
Seren has had to be treated with an EpiPen six times since then. Specialist allergy services in Wales are provided at only two locations by the British Society for Allergy & Clinical Immunology (BSACI), both in Cardiff. This compares with over 100 clinics in England. The family have requested an “oral food challenge” to determine which foods trigger anaphylaxis in their daughter, but currently have to wait as the service is unavailable in their health board.
The NHS staff who treated Seren were described as “fantastic,” but Gemma Whatling said Welsh allergy services were “limited” and vary between health boards. The Welsh government is said to be carrying out a “scoping exercise” in an effort to understand the quality of service for people with food allergies and to address any gaps in provision. Antibody tests are expected to be approved for use on allergy and asthma patients as soon as this year.
For Gemma Whatling and her husband, the constant anxiety over their daughter’s wellbeing caused by her condition is “extremely frightening.” The Natasha Allergy Research Foundation founder, Tanya Laperouse, is campaigning for a UK Government appointed allergy tsar to help the one in three people in the country with allergies, and alleviate the allergy epidemic by expanding specialist clinics that currently require long travel distances
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