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Woman Develops Peanut Allergy After Lung Transplant

An anonymous reader writes "A woman in need of a lung transplant got her new lungs from someone with a peanut allergy who died of anaphylactic shock. Seven months after the surgery, the woman was at an organ transplant support group when she ate a peanut butter cookie and had a violent allergic reaction. So how had the woman's new lungs brought along a peanut allergy? A blog post dives into the medical details and explains that immune cells in the donated lungs couldn't have lived in the new body for long enough to cause the reaction... however, if they encountered an allergen (i.e. something peanuty) shortly after being transplanted, they could have trained the woman's native immune cells to respond."

17 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Info Graphic? by autocracy · · Score: 4, Funny

    Where do you find these pictures? Did somebody get paid to go buy a container of peanuts and make that? Idle indeed...

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    SIG: HUP
  2. Idle? by emkyooess · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wouldn't call this an "idle" article. It's more of a real article that some of them lately.

    1. Re:Idle? by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Agreed. At first I Thought "Well the only sources appear to be blogs" so I understood the idea of putting it under idle.

      BUT, it's on the NCBI Medical Publication website, here:
      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18926410

      So I don't know why they didn't just link that and put this under... I dunno... Is there a Bio or medicine section? Science if nothing else.

    2. Re:Idle? by leonardluen · · Score: 4, Interesting

      it is strange occurrences like this that can have huge impacts on medical science. research into this could very well yield insight into how food allergies develop and possibly ways to treat or reverse them, or also new ways to keep a person's body from rejecting a newly transplanted organ. both of which are immune responses.

    3. Re:Idle? by EvanED · · Score: 4, Informative

      Remove the "idle." from the URL.

    4. Re:Idle? by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 2, Funny

      Reuse the Gates Borg image. I always thought he was nuts and he does cause a bad reaction in some people.

    5. Re:Idle? by LazyBoot · · Score: 2, Informative

      My workaround is to middle-click on the comment headline to expand it AND open it in another tab. That doesn't collapse the rest of the thread in the current window. Then every minute or two I hit Ctrl-W 50 times to clean up.

      Chrome has a nice feature to help you there... "Close tabs to the right" or just "close other tabs"

  3. Prices to pay by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Developing an allergy like that has got to be pretty annoying, but if I had to choose, I'd still prefer new lungs and an allergy over no allergy but no lungs either.

    1. Re:Prices to pay by timeOday · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Well, sure.. But from my extensive medical knowledge (gleaned solely from the slashdot editor's blurb) she might have avoided the allergy simply by avoiding the allergen until a short while after the transplant, when all the donor's immune cells expired. That idea sounds worth exploring.

      Conversely, if there were a way to safely transplant the acquired immunity of a guy in India who drinks from the ganges every day, that would be great.

  4. Transplant drugs? by vlm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I believe if you get a lung transplant you get to take immunosuppresive drugs for life. So, she's on a heavy diet of drugs that deeply mess with her immune system, her immune system malfunctions, therefore it must be some mystical connection to a dead person.

    If you hear hooves, think horse not zebra.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    1. Re:Transplant drugs? by UnknowingFool · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It was my understanding that allergies are an over-reaction of the immune system. People without allergies have immune systems that have minimal responses. I would have thought that the transplant drugs would function the same as allergy medication in that they dampen the response.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
    2. Re:Transplant drugs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      take immunosuppresive drugs for life. So, she's on a heavy diet of drugs that deeply mess with her immune system, her immune system malfunctions, therefore it must be some mystical connection to a dead person.

      Yeah, you know, they cause the immune system to react LESS than otherwise. But if you've actually RTFA, you would have read,

      If an allergic reaction is triggered during the first few days after the transplant, while the donor’s antibodies are still present, the donor’s T cells are able to train the recipient’s B cells to react to the allergen.

      This seems to be what happened: Five days after her lung transplant the recipient ate a candy bar with peanuts. She had a minor reaction but it was relatively benign due to the immune suppressing drugs she was taking for the transplant; her reaction was confused with normal complications of lung transplants. But that first taste of peanut was all that her body needed to prime her for the almost-deadly reaction seven months later. And the woman continues to be allergic to peanuts to this day.

      More interesting thing would be if something like blood donations can result in allergy transplantation as well?? I know they separate the immune system out of the blood cells, but can you separate out the antibodies too??

    3. Re:Transplant drugs? by Tr3vin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm a clod, you insensitive zebra!

  5. The solution is clear by EmagGeek · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sue the donor's estate

  6. pea-nutty holocaust has no basis in science. by xeno · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sigh. Great, now the pea-nutty people have more ammo for declaring nut-free zones (from which they do not remove themselves, ironically) in schools, camps, clubs, etc etc.

    Meanwhile, in the real world.... Around a hundred people die from all food allergies combined in the US each year. Yet thousands of parents and related busybodies haul children off to alergists, and when they're told a "detectable response" exists, they start shrieking about anaphalactic shock and the deadly threat of peanuts, and buy another box of Epi-Pens.

    Nonsense. Complete, utter illogical reality-distorting nonsense. The pea-nutty holocaust has no basis in science. The *only* semi-scientific numbers indicating a spike in peanut allergy incidence was a commercial report sponsored by an Epi-Pen manufacturer several years ago with dubious data sources.

    According to the CDC (which employs actual scientists, I'm told), the deadly threat from peanut allergies affects about 1 in 30 Million people. Deadly allergic reactions to fish and fish oils are more than TWICE as prevalent as peanut allergies. Yet fish sticks are served in school cafeterias, hippie daycare providers happily much on boxed sushi with bare hands, and gramma still makes tuna sandwiches... without an epidemic of people dropping dead.

    I'm sad that this gets press, not because single real events aren't tragic. I'm sad because my kids have to suffer thru more of the secondary effects: an ongoing flood of hysterical peanut hypochondria.

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    I think not...(*poof*)
  7. Not just allergies by scorp1us · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've done research into this because I suffer from several allergies to common foods, and more than one is life threatening. I want to donate blood, but I fear that I will pass them on. No use in saving someone only to kill them with what is coming from the hospital cafeteria... Though it would take repeated exposures for the allergy to be significant enough to become life threatening.

    Well, its not just allergies, but all kinds of things including neurological issues like nervous ticks are transmittable well.

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    Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
  8. All sorts of things get transplanted... by Quantus347 · · Score: 2, Funny

    For example, you get a bone marrow transplant and your blood type will change to that of the donor. Maybe they should start transplanting those rare blood-types to blood bank volunteers. I know a few homeless guys that would love to get a higher premium for their donation.

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    Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...