Egg Allergy Symptoms & Causes

Food allergy is quite common among all kinds of allergy. Within this category, the most common one is the eggs allergy. Eggs allergy is more well-known to be occurred in children than adults. There are several things that you should know about this topic.

The Cause

Basically, the immune system inside the body is very sensitive toward the proteins inside egg yolks or egg whites. It is wrongly identified as harmful thing by the immune system. Thus, once the person eats the eggs, the immune system will defend by releasing some kinds of body chemicals. Next, these chemicals cause the body to show symptoms of food allergy. People tend to be more allergenic toward egg whites than yolks. Even if a mother consumes eggs, her baby still has the risk of getting eggs allergy. This is happened when the baby is breast-fed.

The Symptoms

The signs of this food allergy can be seen after consuming the eggs. It can be several minutes or several hours after consumption. There are many signs of egg allergy. One common symptom is the skin reaction. It can be rash, excessive swelling, hives, and eczema. It can be followed by sneezing and runny nose. The eyes will be red and watery too. The person will feel pains in the stomach and experience vomiting and diarrhea. Another symptom is breathing difficulty. In some rare cases, there can be anaphylaxis. The last one is quite rare to happen. This will happen to the people with severe allergy. If the person has reached this condition, the family should directly bring him or her to the emergency room. This sickness can be shown from cramping, shock, swollen throat, and fast heart pulse.

Early detection of Egg allergy

To know whether a person suffers from eggs allergy or not, he or she has to do blood testing. It can be achieved by doing skin prick testing too. In doing this, the allergies will put egg protein liquid on the skin. Then, they will wait around 15 minutes to see any symptoms. This test can help you in determining your eggs allergy. It can be specific toward egg yolk or egg white proteins. Meanwhile, a blood test is done to observe any existence of immunoglobulin E in the blood.

How to Reduce of Egg Allergy

Basically, as the baby grows up, he or she will outgrow the food allergy toward eggs. But, to make sure that everything is going to the natural way, it is better to provide egg-free diet. Doing this can be very challenging. This is because many foods have eggs as one of the content. It can be found in ice cream, bread, cake, meatballs, and even soup. Thus, you should read carefully the table of ingredients that provided on each food box. There are many ingredients that have eggs too. This is can be found in silica albuminate, vitellin, livetin, globulin, fat substitutes, artificial flavoring, nougat, and others.

The safest way is cooking the food at home. You can cook meat or chicken soup, salad, or others. This way, you can make sure that the dishes are free from eggs. Thus, you can avoid yourself or your children from food allergy.