We are allergic to modern life – especially in the Home Counties
One of my childhood friends was a solid, serious little boy called Jonathan. We both lived in suburban houses with large gardens, but mine had the added attraction of a wartime bomb shelter – a dank cavern, irresistibly fascinating to two imaginative children.
One afternoon when Jonathan came round to play, I had something even more exciting to show him: a new guinea-pig called Flora, with white fur and ruby eyes.
Flora turned out to be an insipid, charmless character. But on this occasion her effect was dramatic. Hardly had Jonathan set eyes on her than he turned red, swelled up and began to gasp. What ailed him, inquired my mother. “Allergic,” wheezed Jonathan. Declining my mother’s flustered offer of Garibaldi biscuits and Calamine lotion, he plodded stoically home to recover.
Allergic to a guineapig! Who knew? In Sittingbourne in the Sixties we had never come across such a thing. In the Home Counties in 2016, on the other hand, it appears that an individual without an allergy is almost as exotic a phenomenon as poor Jonathan and his guinea-pig intolerance.
A study has found that, in the past five years, NHS prescriptions for antidotes to extreme allergic reactions have risen by 18 per cent, while prescriptions for antihistamines have risen by 24 per cent. The curious thing about these figures is their geographical inconsistency. Prescriptions for allergies are three times as common in the affluent Home Counties than the comparatively deprived North West – a reversal of the usual trend for prescriptions to increase in inverse proportion to wealth.
Behind the figures is an intriguing narrative. It could be simple: more allergy-triggering plants and pets in the leafy Home Counties than the post-industrial North? But there may be more to it than pollen counts and labrador dandruff. In a recent book, It’s All
in Your Head, Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan describes her work as a neurologist specialising in psychogenic disorders. Like many physicians with a literary turn of mind, she is particularly fascinated by the ingenuity of human beings when it comes to expressing distress. What cannot be spoken finds outlet in paralysis, seizure, blindness, incapacitating pain and countless other symptoms: all entirely real, though medically unexplained.
Humane and deeply sympathetic, Dr O’Sullivan nevertheless notes the astounding cost to the NHS of treating such somatic disorders: £115 million a year in London for the most severely affected. No estimates exist for the cost of treating less acute disorders, which constitute “up to 30 per cent of GP encounters”.
Allergy symptoms are real, of course. That is Dr O’Sullivan’s point about all suffering, whatever its cause. And, over the years, I have dutifully banished my cat, aborted a child’s longed-for trip to a stableyard and planned menus to accommodate allergies to every imaginable comestible, from cherries to sesame seeds.
Still, when you look at the striking irregularity of the figures, some story is there, waiting to be told. Of stoic Northerners and soft Southerners? Of harassed GPs and the placebo effect? Or of the strange toxicity of life in the Home Counties, where Range Rovers and swimming pools cohabit with an undertow of dread: a sense of an existence so fragile that a single sesame seed could end it.