Allergy testing for kids?

seeker

Thu, Dec 04 2014, 2:34 am

I considered doing it for my 2-year-old but decided to hold off ONLY because the preschool we send to is small and strictly nut free by default and the rest of the time she's with family and we are a strictly nut-free family, plus we already always have benadryl and Jr. EpiPen with us for our older child with a known nut allergy. Whenever I send her to a babysitter I tell them to take all nut allergy cautions and not give her anything with nuts or "may contain traces" just in case. I feel that I can trust our babysitter in this regard.

But beyond this particular preschool I feel that the world is so much bigger and messier that I will want to know because it will become impractical to just keep her nut free forever, and she won't always be home near our benadryl and epipen anymore. So either when she's heading to a bigger school or when our pediatrician tells us to, we'll do the challenge test. I'm just so not looking forward to it and feel it would be more traumatic to a baby who doesn't understand why they're being pricked a hundred times.

MaBelleVie

Thu, Dec 04 2014, 10:14 am

newmommy22 wrote:

She probably won't test positive to it unless she was exposed to it already at some point.

This is not necessarily true. I would definitely do testing. Why not?

seeker

Thu, Dec 04 2014, 5:31 pm

For a child who was not exposed to the potential allergens, they do a skin-prick test which does expose them to the allergen, so it does have a good chance of working. Of course not absolutely foolproof but that's what I was advised to do.

If I were sending to a school that is not nut-free I would do it now. because our nursery school is strictly nut-free anyway, I feel that the risk is very low. I do tell people not to feed her tree nut products in general; but I wouldn't expect a school to go to nut-free lengths only for a child without a confirmed allergy.