During the recent Food Allergy Awareness Week (May 11-17), Maria Said, president of consumer lobby group Anaphylaxis Australia, announced that on current projections, the number of people in Australia with allergies would nearly double to 7.7 million in just over 40 years.

In honor of the 11th annual Food Allergy Awareness Week in the USA, Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN) unveiled its new advocacy initiative "Five Steps Forward for Food Allergy".

The USA Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is currently working to establish a definition for "gluten-free" so that the words can be used accurately on food labels. The FDA proposal could give labeling approval to food that does not contain 20 parts per million or more gluten. 

The UK House of Lords has debated the Science and Technology Committee's report on Allergy which was published in September 2007. The Government responded to the report in November last year and accepted many of the Committee's recommendations. The debate aimed to give the Committee the opportunity to question the Government on how far they have got in implementing these recommendations.

In a recent seminar published in the Lancet medical journal, a food allergy expert at Duke University Medical Centre in North Carolina claims some type of immunotherapy to offset peanut allergy will be available in five years. This theory is based on the number of different studies that are currently being conducted.

Lists of allergens that require labelling were originally drawn up on the basis of a combination of prevalence and severity information. Since then the number of allergenic foods for which reactions have been well documented has grown considerably. The Food Allergy Task Force of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) Europe has recently reviewed the criteria for identifying allergenic foods of public health importance.