How you produce allergy symptoms

One of your immune system’s role is to fight against viruses and bacteria that enter your body, protecting you from getting sick. Instead, those of you who have allergies have immune systems that use their defenses to attack foreign invaders that are harmless such as animal hair, dander and saliva. This is called a hypersensitive immune reaction which involves IgE antibodies (defenders of your body) to fight against these harmless invaders that have entered.

When your body produces these antibodies, they then get ready to fight by releasing weapons to destroy the foreign invaders immediately. These weapons are chemicals called histamine, cytokines and leukotrienes whom are responsible for producing all of the symptoms that occur when you come in contact with animals.

Symptoms:

• Urticaria: Hives or itchy welts
• Puffy, red, itchy, watery eyes
• Sneezing and coughing
• Asthma: Shortness of breath or wheezing
• Rhinitis: Stuffy nose, itchy nose, nasal discharge, itchy ears, itchy palate (roof of mouth)

Steps to reduce your allergic reactions to animals

Just doing these few steps can bring instant relief to those horrible symptoms.

• Frequent vacuuming of the floors and furniture
• Try not to let the pets inside the house too often
• Keep the pet well groomed and bathed weekly (get someone else to do this!)
• Close air vents when the pet is inside the house, as they can circulate the animal hair and dander around the house that you could react to later
• Keep your skin covered when playing with animals, so that the saliva and hair don’t come in contact with your skin avoiding that beautiful rash

Beginning these steps to really reduce your exposure to animals, while still being able to keep your beloved pet will make your life much brighter. However it won’t completely relieve your symptoms. You can look into medications or natural relief treatments that will really help you with the symptoms when they hit. There are also allergy products that have been especially designed to help people just like you.

Related posts:

1. The Sad Truth About Animal Allergies
2. Common Environmental Allergy Symptoms
3. Why Am I Allergic To Animals?

Allergies are produced from a hypersensitive immune system, but how does your immune system get this way in the first place? We discuss possible reasons that may link to your animal allergies:

• Nutritional deficiencies: If you are deficient in important vitamins and minerals needed for proper immune function, it could create a dysregulation causing your immune system to go haywire.
• Genetic susceptibility: If your parents are prone to allergies and have an allergy to animals, it greatly increases your chance of also being allergic to animals. The same antibodies that are created in your Mum against animal hair can be passed on to you at birth, producing the same allergic reaction in you.
• Excessive chemical exposure: Breathing in exhaust fumes, cigarrete smoke, pollution and ingesting chemicals found in your food such as pesticides, food additives and preservatives on a day to day basis, can place a rather large burden on your body. This burden can lead to a susceptibility to allergies as your body gets confused between what chemicals are harmful and what are harmless such as animal dander.
• Food sensitivities: If you have food sensitivities, you can often be prone to other allergies including animal allergies.

Lets talk about these reasons in a little bit more depth.

Overburdened Immune System

With an overload of toxins and chemicals in your environment, it can put a great impact on your body’s ability to effectively eliminate these substances. When your body’s detoxification ability is decreased it overburdens your immune system as it frantically tries to decipher the chaos of toxins of what is harmless and should be destroyed and what isn’t. As a result your immune system becomes erratic and confused targeting substances that aren’t harmful like animal hair or saliva.

Food sensitivities can create animal allergies later down the track!

Another cause to animal allergies often begins with food sensitivities. What commonly occurs in infants is atopic dermatitis (eczema) created in response to a food allergen, whether it is to cows milk, or an allergen found in the breast milk. If the food sensitivity is not eliminated and is just suppressed with creams like cortisone, the eczema will disappear and then show up later as asthma. Later on when the child gets older, hay fever and animal allergies begins to occur created by the hypersensitive immune system. If identification and treatment of food allergies are caught early, often these problems can be prevented in adulthood.

When animal allergies are triggered in adulthood, food sensitivities can still be contributing. An allergic reaction in one area of your body such as the digestive system can make the body more reactive in other areas. So reducing the overall allergenic load on your body can decrease at least the severity of symptoms produced in response to the animal allergens.

Now that you know what may be causing your animal allergies, lets take a look at what sort of symptoms you might be experiencing and the best treatment strategy for you.

Related posts:

1. The Sad Truth About Animal Allergies
2. Common Animal Allergy Symptoms
3. Why Am I Allergic To Food?

Who said dogs are supposed to be a man’s best friend?

Don’t feel like you’re alone, because allergies to animals are quite common. Household pets particuarly dogs and cats seem to throw many people into a sneezing frenzy or an itchy rash. Sometimes it can be from the animal’s saliva, hair or dander (flakes of skin), either way very similar symptoms tend to occur.

Allergies to animals seem to commonly occur in families, so if your Mum or Dad has an allergy to animals it’s most likely the reason why you have an allergy to animals. An allergic reaction to animals is caused from your immune system being oversensitive to the proteins found in animal hair, saliva or dander which has been programmed in you from your parents. Your immune system will see the proteins as harmful, so what it does is releases a number of weapons to stop it from entering your body and causing harm. Unfortunately while your immune system thinks it is doing a super job, you get to endure the horrible symptoms resulting from the fight.

Usually people who are allergic to animals will have asthma that runs in their family, eczema or other allergic traits. Though inherited animal allergies are common, many people can actually end up with an animal allergy later on in adult hood.

Looking at the reasons why you are unlucky to be stuck with animal allergies may help you understand yourself a little better and may even help you relieve your symptoms.

Related posts:

1. Common Animal Allergy Symptoms
2. The Sad Truth About Environmental Allergies
3. The Sad Truth About Food Allergies