Allergies by the Million

Many Americans used to suffer from complaints known as hay fever, asthma, or hives, for which they tried all manner of "simples" with scant success. Nowadays, they talk knowingly about their allergies, take scratch and patch tests and complicated treatments, and many enjoy marked relief. But most cannot hope to be cured; they must learn to live with their allergies, and for this they should understand them.

In Allergy: Facts and Fancies (Harper; $2.50), Dr. Samuel M. Feinberg, Northwestern University allergist, sets out to tell what is known and what isn't about a subject on which, doctors themselves frequently disagree.

In the first place, says Feinberg, the field is a huge one. There are in the U.S., he estimates, about 10 million allergy victims; about 2,000,000 have asthma, up to 7,000,000 have hay fever and the rest an assortment of hives, eczema, sinus disorders, reactions to foods, allergic headaches, contact allergies such as ivy poisoning, serum sickness and sensitivity to drugs.

Feinberg is convinced that people with one allergic parent are more likely to be victims of allergies than others, and those with two allergic parents have two strikes on them. He rejects the idea that allergies are the result of personality upsets, although other researchers have found that a man who gets mad at his boss may have an allergic reaction. Rather, Feinberg thinks, the allergic discomforts create the personality difficulty. Moreover, he says sharply, "There is no such thing as allergy to work, to one's mother-in-law, or to one's spouse."*

Like most allergists, Dr. Feinberg delights in the detective work of tracking down the cat dander, hair oil, dye, tanning material, feather dust and metals which have been convicted of causing some of his patients' allergies. Although ACTH has proved a big help in cases of asthma and related allergies, Dr. Feinberg reports that ACTH itself has caused some allergic reactions.

Dr. Feinberg complains that although the economic cost of allergies to the nation is enormous (in time lost from work), only about a tenth of the victims take their allergies to a doctor. Far more money, he argues, should be spent on allergy research. Then, he is confident, "allergy can have a bright future."

*The California court, which annulled a marriage because the wife broke out in a rash when she met her husband or even talked about him (TIME, Oct. 3, 1949), did not rule that she was allergic to him. Her rash may have been psychosomatic.

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