Does Hong Kong have enough expertise to treat peanut allergies for some 21,000 people?
Expert says city would need about 70 allergists for a population of 7.34 million; it currently has fewer than 10
Dr Lee Tak-hong, director of the Allergy Centre at the Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital, said the city’s estimated 21,000 peanut allergy sufferers continued to be neglected by the city’s health system.
He said the number of allergists had increased slightly since 2014, from one per 1.46 million people to one per 1.17 million. But he said Hong Kong would need about 70 allergists for a population of 7.34 million to cope with the needs of sufferers, he said. There are currently fewer than 10 allergists in the city.
Lee made the comments in relation to a new Australian study by scientists at Melbourne’s Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. They gave children with peanut allergies a probiotic, along with small doses of a peanut protein for an 18-month clinical trial starting in 2013.
Four years on, 70 per cent of the children in the trial could eat peanuts without suffering an adverse reaction, according to research published in medical journal The Lancet last month.
