Let's Talk Allergies

Food Allergies – A comprehensive review of how they affect our children.

How would you feel if all of a sudden you got sick when you ate you favorite food? You know your daughter is allergic to peanuts but got sick when she ate some chocolate chip cookies. Wonder why?

Many people are born with food allergies and other develop them at some point in their life. As a kid I ate cold watermelon and cantelope like there was no tomorrow. Then one day at summer camp I ate some watermelon and my head blew up like a basketball and I had a real hard time breathing. The doctor said I was allergic to melons and he did not know what triggered it and maybe one day it would go away. 35 years later and I still can’t eat them.

We get lots of calls from people looking for answers, suggestions, tips and help in dealing with food allergies. This is a real problem for parents that have children that have food allergies. As an adult I know what to avoid, but children don’t and friends and relatives don’t either. They don’t understand that the child with the food allergy can get seriously ill by the smallest contact. They can’t believe they can get that sick by eating a chocolate chip cookie that was baked in the same factory as a peanut butter cookie. I had on customer tell me her son got ill from eating food that was packaged in a plant by a peanut farm. The packaging plant did not even package anything with peanuts but the allergens got blown in to the plant.

While we don’t deal with food allergies we are always looking for ways to help our customers. Recently we were sent a copy of “Flourishing With Food Allergies” a really good book about how to help children and their families live with food allergies. It is full of tips on how to handle play dates and birthday parties, making educated discussions about schools, piratical guidance about diets, allergen control and travel so many other helpful topics.

It provide you wonderful tools and resources and is a must read for parents of children with food allergies.

The author, A. Anderson, has two son’s that have had food allergies since birth so she knows what you are going through.

Flourishing with Food Allergies: Social, Emotional and Practical Guidance for Families with Young Children is available from Amazon

Wishing you the best of health
AllergyStore– Helping our customers for 20 years.

HEPA Room Air Cleaners

We get asked every so often why we only carry Austin Air Healthmate and Airpura HEPA air cleaners. The answer is very simple. They work. You turn them on and they suck in the dust and other allergens floating in the air. I don’t agree with consumer reports on this one.

Neither the Austin Air or Airpura air cleaners have any fancy controls, flashing lights or warning noises. All they have is a 3 speed on/off switch. Pretty simple yet very effective. The machines are made from 16 gage steel and have a powder coated finish so there is no out gassing or rattles coming from any plastic. My daughter even uses her air cleaner as a night stand.

The design of the Austin air and Airpura units is basic. Air is drawn into the unit on all sides of the machine. Then it is drawn through 2 prefilters, activated carbon/zeolite and the the HEPA filter. A couple of the Airpura air cleaners also incorporate UV as a way to keep the filter free of virus and bacteria. Like I said, simple but effective.

Several brands of air cleaners being sold today use ionization as a way of cleaning the air. All ionization does is make the particles heavy and they drop to the floor or on the furniture. The air is cleaner until you walk across the floor and then the particles will become airborne again. They float around awhile and then fall again.

Both manufactures stand behind their machines with warranties of 5 to 10 years. I can guarantee you most of the air cleaners being sold today will not last more than 2 years much less 5. We have customers that have had their air cleaners for 15 plus years and they are still going strong.

We can have any air cleaner we want in our home. The only HEPA air cleaner we use are Austin Air Healthmate. They are simple yet effective. For more general information about air cleaners and air purifiers check out hepaaircleaner.com.

Wishing you the best of health.
Mike Krause
AllergyStore.com

More info at Hubpage:

UV Light Hype

We have received several comments and calls about the use of ultraviolet (UV) in air cleaners.

Ultraviolet (UV) has been used for decades as a means to sterilize medical instruments and water. When it was first introduced into the air cleaner market it caused many problems because of the amount of ozone produced by UV-B. About 10 years ago companies started selling UV-C systems designed for air conditioning equipment. It did not produce the harmful ozone that the UV-B did and in fact they did a great job of keeping the air handling units clean.

Then the air cleaner manufacture manufactures got in the game and started installing UV bulbs in their products and making all sorts of exaggerated claims. Yes UV kills bacteria, viruses, germs, etc. True scientific facts. What they don’t tell you is that the air is moving past the UV light at 75 to 700 cfm therefore there is very little actual contact time.

FACT…In order for UV to be effective it has to shine on the organism for a certain amount of time and that varies on the organism itself.

If you look in our air cleaner section you will find 2 products that use UV technology. One is the Fresh-Aire air handler unit and the other one is the Airpura UV600 air cleaner. The Fresh-Aire unit keeps coils, liners, motor housings and other internal part free of harmful microbial growth and the light in UV600 kills whatever gets caught in the filter.

The key is they both use UV as a way to keep a certain area clean and free of harmful microbial growth. Keep the surface clean and the byproduct is cleaner healthier air.

Is Ultraviolet helpful in keeping the air in you home clean? Yes, but only when it is used correctly.