I found the following statistics on various websites –

AUSTRALIA: Australia has one of the highest allergic incidence rates in the developed world.
CANADA: Between 3% and 4% of Canadian adults, and nearly 6 % of children suffer from food allergies
GERMANY: The prevalence in children is 3 percent to 6 percent, but can be up to 30 percent in high-risk groups, such as children with eczema.
ITALY: An estimated 6 to 8% of the Italian population has food allergies.
JAPAN: about 7% of population had some form of food allergy.
MALAYSIA: about 30% of young children are likely to develop allergic disorders in the first five years of life.
SWEDEN: one out of 15 children with reported adverse reactions to food.
US: One in every 17 children under the age of 3 has food allergy.

And really serious food reactions are not all that rare – “A study in Arch Intern Med 2001 Jan 8;161(1):15-2, Anaphylaxis in the United States: an investigation into its epidemiology, concluded with “The occurrence of anaphylaxis in the US is not as rare as is generally believed. On the basis of our figures, the problem of anaphylaxis may, in fact, affect 1.21% (1.9 million) to 15.04% (40.9 million) of the US population.” PMID 11146694″

So is this epidemic of food allergies mostly among young children caused by being too clean (hygiene theory – food allergies are unknown in undeveloped countries) in the last 5 years or something else?

1960 – children received on average one or two vaccines
1980 – children received 8-9 vaccines
1990 – children were routinely given 10 vaccines
2000 – Children now receive 33 vaccinations before they enter school
2007 – Children are now to receive 48 doses of 14 vaccines by age six and 53-56 doses of 15 or 16 vaccines by age 12.

Vaccines contain an adjuvant that increases the body’s immune response to the protein in the vaccine. Something that the public and most physicians don’t realize is that the adjuvant can also contain a mixture of vegetable and animal oils that have a trace of food protein in them. This is a protected trade secret and does not have to appear on the package insert. The ingredients of many adjuvants can only be found by reading patents. What are these oils? Soy, sesame, peanut, wheat germ, corn, shellfish, fish, etc.

Can a trace amount of food protein in a vaccine cause food allergy? Yes. This has been known since 1839, when the French physiologist Francois Magendie injected animals to create a food allergy to egg whites.

The food industry has to label food that may contain trace amounts of peanuts or nuts but the pharmaceutical industry is exempt. Shouldn’t your doctor know if he is injecting a peanut-allergic patient with peanut oil?

As for how you perceive my focus, that is my fault as I was trying to draw the conversation in a particular direction. What I would like to do is to table the immunology conversation as it isn’t really that related to this particular blog post and is, as you point out, a broad topic in its own right.

What I want to come back to is the validity of the flu recommendation, given the effectiveness of the shot. You mentioned about that the issue of nonvaxing parents not taking children in for care is “valid,” and I challenge that. If the parameters of this particular study are constructed around necessary medical treatment, how is it a confounding factor that children not requiring this care are not being brought in for it? Or, are all these children that are being brought in not in need of this care?

Secondly, does it really matter why the vaccine doesn’t work, if it is the vaccine for sale? In this study, for instance, it is a bad match that supposedly causes the problem (although I do find it very curious that the authors don’t raise this point in their final paragraph – what is the hysterical obsession with non-vaxing families that these people have?), but that was the one they were selling, the one they were recommending that season. Sure, we can say that both efficacy and effectiveness must be confirmed before we will vaccinate our children, but that is completely different than what the CDC says. And you and I may be in a position to say “screw the CDC, I’ll make my own decisions about vaccines based upon the science,” but most parents are not making their decisions that way. For them, this vaccine doesn’t work.

Back to you:

This is actually the point I was making; you are focused upon vaccines so your perception of immunology research is skewed. Just do a PubMed search for immunology and look at all of the papers generated that have nothing to do with vaccines.

As for vitamins and supplements, you may be interested in this:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/news-keeps-getting-worse-for-vitamins/?em
A considerable amount of research but not very favourable results.

Of course vaccinologists are either immunologists or have a heavy basis in immunology amongst other disciplines. What I was trying to state was that those, i.e. anti-vax pundits seem to think that the study of immunology only encompasses vaccine technology and that is not the case at all. Does that make more sense?

I will weigh in on your question to Marconi, if you don’t mind. Immunology is implicit for vaccinology for those that only know immunology from a vaccine-issue standpoint. It is a vast discipline and there are so many new discoveries made and published, it is a shame if the study of immunology is pigeon-holed into one small aspect by some.