Gerber recalls teething sticks sold across U.S., including Wisconsin, over choking risk
The notice said the recall was initiated after Gerber received complaints of choking incidents involving the affected products, one of which resulted in an emergency room visit.
Here's what to know:
Three types of Gerber Soothe N Chew teething were named in the Jan. 31 recall. All batches of each product are being recalled and discontinued.
The products can be identified using the following information:
Gerber Soothe N Chew Teething Sticks – Strawberry Apple: Net Wt. 3.2 Oz (90g), with UPC 0 15000 04618 7, all lot codes
Gerber Soothe N Chew Teething Sticks – Banana: Net Wt. 3.2 Oz (90g), with UPC 0 15000 04608 8, all lot codes
Gerber Soothe N Chew Teething Sticks – Banana: Net Wt. 1.59 Oz (45g), with UPC 0 15000 01015 7, all lot codes
Recalled products were sold online and in retailers across 45 states, according to the recall notice. Aside from Wisconsin, products were sold in: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Vermont and Washington.
Recalled products were also sold in Puerto Rico.
More: Stanley has recalled 2.6 million mugs sold in the U.S., including Wisconsin, over burn risk
More: What to know about the frozen taquitos recall at Aldi that could affect Wisconsinites
Consumers who own the recalled teething sticks are urged to not let infants or children consume them and return them to the point of purchase for a full refund. Those concerned about adverse effects are urged to contact a healthcare provider.
Gerber can also be reached by phone at 1-800-4-GERBER (1-800-443-7237).
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Gerber teething sticks recall: Wisconsin among 45 states affected
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Scientific American
8 hours ago
- Scientific American
Can Peanut Allergies Be Cured?
Anabelle Terry, a slender, self-possessed 13-year-old, has heard the peanut butter story her entire life. At two and a half she ate nuts for the first time. Her mother, Victoria, had made a little treat: popcorn drizzled with melted caramel, chocolate and peanut butter. Anabelle gobbled it down. 'And afterward, I felt really sick,' she says. A few minutes later she vomited on the kitchen floor. There was more trouble ahead. A visit to an allergist confirmed that Anabelle was severely allergic to the peanut butter in the dessert, as well as to most other nuts. It began a life upheaval familiar to families of kids with allergies: learning to decode labels, to carry an EpiPen, and to interrogate friends and their parents about the ingredients in a birthday cake. Every once in a while, there would be a slip-up. It might be a snack that someone hadn't scrutinized or a food package that didn't list all potential allergens. And every time, Anabelle's reactions got worse. Although she was just a schoolkid, she had to stay alert. 'Eating lunch, all my friends would have PB&Js. And I'd be like, I'm going to sit a little bit farther away,' she recalls. 'And going over to friends' houses after school, we always had to make sure: 'Hey, would you mind making a nut-free meal?'' On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Most of that caution is in Anabelle's past now. For the vast majority of patients, peanut allergy is an unpredictable, lifelong affliction. But thanks to a clinical trial that Anabelle entered when she was nine, she can now tolerate peanuts and tree nuts well enough to feel safe every day. The drug she received in that trial was approved for treating food allergies by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year, making it the second food allergy remedy to earn the agency's blessing since 2020. And an array of other clinical trials are tackling peanut allergy in a variety of ways, from new modalities for desensitizing patients to bold new applications of existing drugs. Some have reported striking successes. 'It's an amazing time right now,' says R. Sharon Chinthrajah, an associate professor at Stanford Medicine, who led the national trial Anabelle joined. In fact, medicine's entire understanding of how to keep children safe from ever developing allergies is being rethought. With peanut reactions, for instance, there are real hopes that children can be protected—definitely from the worst effects and maybe from any at all. 'The future looks very bright for our patients to have more choices in different periods in their lifetime,' Chinthrajah says. 'We're not yet at the cure, but we're definitely moving along on the therapeutic front to be able to deal with this chronic disease.' Peanut allergies are perplexing, in part because they appeared so recently. Food reactions have occurred throughout recorded history, but widespread peanut problems didn't begin to surface until the 1990s. The effects on everyday life were dramatic: airlines began to deprive passengers of peanuts and announce that certain snacks might threaten someone else onboard. Elementary schools set aside peanut-free tables at lunch, and food manufacturers began to label their baked goods 'school-safe' to signal they were free of common allergens. Epinephrine auto-injectors, which can shut down severe allergic shock (and are usually called EpiPens, for the dominant trademarked version), were rare and carried mostly for the occasional beesting. Now they are a ubiquitous, nearly $3-billion product. Scott Sicherer, a clinician and director of the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, watched reports of peanut threats rise in real time. In 1997 he and his colleagues conducted the first survey of peanut and tree-nut allergy in the U.S., finding that 1.6 percent of adults and 0.6 percent of children described themselves as allergic based on reactions they had experienced. The group repeated the survey with a similar-size representative sample five years later and learned that the rate of nut allergies reported in children had doubled to 1.2 percent. In a third sampling, conducted 11 years after the first one, the overall rate tripled from that initial measurement to 2.1 percent of children, and peanut allergies were reported in 1.4 percent of kids. Since then, the prevalence has risen even more. A large national survey of parents conducted between 2015 and 2016 by researchers in Illinois and California found that food allergies affect 7.6 percent of U.S. children, and peanut allergy affects 2.2 percent. An analysis of health-care payment data in 2018 asked how many new diagnoses of peanut allergy there are among children born each year—what statisticians call incidence, as opposed to prevalence—and reported a rate of 5 percent. And what's more common is now also more dire: researchers at the Mayo Clinic have estimated that emergency-department visits for anaphylactic shock caused by foodborne allergies—the kind of reaction that can squeeze shut airways and trigger heart attacks—increased more than threefold between 2005 and 2014. The highest rate was for peanut allergies. 'One out of 10 individuals in the U.S., more than 33 million, has a food allergy,' says Sung Poblete, CEO of Food Allergy Research and Education, an advocacy organization. 'One out of 13 kids has food allergies. That's two kids out of every classroom.' Medicine's entire understanding of how to keep children safe from allergies is being rethought. This increase—which is happening around the world, though not at the same rate in every nation—is a mystery. Food allergy is fundamentally a disease of inflammation. The immune system recognizes certain proteins in a food as unwelcome and launches a cascading reaction that often involves an antibody called IgE. The antibody triggers a whole-body inflammatory response: hives, swelling, vomiting, and, in the worst cases, crashing blood pressure and an inability to breathe. 'Inflammatory diseases of many kinds are more common than they used to be,' says Brian Vickery, a professor of pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine and director of the Food Allergy Program at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, who is a principal investigator on multiple clinical trials. 'Eczema, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, cancer, depression—all these things have inflammatory origins and are more common now.' The reasons seem to be varied. Researchers have proposed that cleaner modern life, early antibiotic exposure, and microbiome damage from detergents and surfactants—all components of what's called the hygiene hypothesis—might influence how often allergies develop. Genetics may predispose people to react to certain foods. There may be a clue as well in which foods provoke reactions. Up to 90 percent of food allergies are caused by just eight things: peanuts, milk, eggs, fish, crustaceans, tree nuts, wheat and soybeans. (These are the foods that, according to a 2004 U.S. law, have to be declared on labels; a separate 2021 law added sesame to the list.) Why these foods are especially allergenic also puzzles researchers. They contain complex proteins, which remain intact during digestion and may trigger the immune system in ways other foods do not; these proteins also may have similarities to common environmental allergens. Regardless of the underlying causes, research is zeroing in on ways to mitigate food allergies. Peanut allergy is the priority because the disruptions it imposes have become so visible in society. But the hope is that some of the new approaches can be applied to other allergies—and to help children such as Anabelle who experience more than one. The first priority in tackling peanut allergy has been children who are at extraordinary risk, the ones whose lives are at stake if they consume something with the smallest cross-contamination from a manufacturing error. People who suffer from seasonal allergies often receive allergy shots, a program of injections that gradually decreases their sensitivity and keeps their reactions at a level they can tolerate. Allergy shots were briefly tried for peanuts as well, but they were abandoned because of safety concerns, including the 1991 death of a trial participant who received a miscalculated dose. After that, patients' only remaining option was to change their diet, but mistakes and cross-contamination kept putting them at risk. It took more than a decade for immunologists to try a different method of desensitization for peanut allergies that had a century-old history: giving minuscule, escalating doses by mouth, a process called oral immunotherapy. A large international study in 2018 definitively proved that the approach worked, and it became the standard for treating kids whose families weren't willing to trust avoidance. In 2020 it led to the first-ever FDA approval of a therapy for peanut allergy, a powdered form of peanut protein with the trade name Palforzia that is dispensed over months in precisely metered doses. That was a huge advance—but, for some families, still not a solution. Initially Palforzia was not approved for children younger than four years of age. Dosing needed to be extremely precise and, according to some practitioners, was tricky to manage. Plus, the drug debuted at the start of the COVID pandemic, when repeat office visits for dose changes became especially challenging. And as the drug's own labeling acknowledges, taking it poses the possibility of reactions. That has left some allergy families searching for alternatives to oral immunotherapy. 'Ten to 20 percent of patients can't finish the treatment because of the side effects,' says Edwin H. Kim, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and director of the UNC Food Allergy Initiative. 'And up to 10 percent of patients experience anaphylaxis at some point while they're on the treatment itself.' Kim is participating in research into two other methods for presenting smaller doses of peanut allergens to the immune system safely: sublingually (under the tongue) and on the skin. The skin method involves a patch containing peanut protein that is applied daily at home for as many as three years; the patch always contains the same dose but is gradually applied for escalating amounts of time. In a phase 3 clinical trial, the results of which were published in 2023, 67 percent of toddlers who were too young to receive Palforzia and who wore the patch were able to raise the amount of peanut protein they could safely consume to the equivalent of three or four peanuts. That was twice as many children as in the placebo group. The hope for the patch, which has not yet been approved by the FDA, is that it will be easier for kids to tolerate because of its lower dose and easier for parents to manage logistically. Lora Milburn's son, Vance, wore it for a year as a trial participant. He was eight months old when he started showing allergy symptoms—too young to have words for what he was experiencing—and four years old when he entered the trial through Kim's clinic. He was expected to finish the trial in August of this year, and his mother already thinks his sensitivity is diminished. She does not know whether he received the real treatment or a placebo, but she has noticed the way he reacts to the patch. 'Some days he doesn't really complain about it; some days he's scratching his back against the wall trying to get the itchies out,' she says. 'But he knows why we're doing it. If it's nighttime, he's like, 'Mommy, take my patch off, put my new patch on.'' All these exposure therapies—the patch, the oral doses, the version that goes under the tongue—target reactions to specific peanut allergens. But a separate cadre of researchers has envisioned the struggle to control peanut responses as an entryway to remodeling the way that the immune system reacts to food more broadly. In 2013 they began testing the efficacy of an existing drug, a monoclonal antibody named omalizumab (marketed as Xolair) that is already approved for severe asthma caused by allergies. 'It's an anti-IgE biologic, and IgE antibodies are at the center of the whole allergic inflammatory cascade,' Chinthrajah explains. 'And the beauty of something like that, where you're targeting allergic inflammation, is that it has the potential to help all allergies.' Investigators launched a trial that admitted children and adults who showed allergies to peanuts and at least two other foods; Anabelle Terry was one of the participants. Using a complex study design with several stages, the scientists tested whether regular doses of the injectable drug worked better to reduce allergic sensitivity than did placebos; whether shorter or longer courses of the drug made a difference; whether it worked best alone or combined with oral immunotherapy; and how often and in what amounts people could consume allergenic food once they stopped the treatment. In 2024 the researchers (a very large team working in multiple medical centers) published the first results. In children aged one to 17 years, 67 percent of those who received the drug were able to eat the equivalent of four peanuts, enough to keep them safe from any accidental exposure. Based on those results, and anticipating more data, the FDA immediately approved Xolair as a protection against peanut allergy. Participating in the trial was a significant commitment for families. Jennifer Jennison's son, Jack, was two years old and allergic to eggs, peanuts and cashews—among other foods—when the trial accepted him at its Atlanta site. Every two weeks she or her husband, David, would take time off work to bring their son for an injection. After around seven months, the protocol added tests of small doses of food allergens in applesauce to the office visits; after several hours of observation to make sure the dose was safe, the family carried home boxes of premeasured allergen powder for Jack to eat every day. And in a third phase, Jack progressed to a daily maintenance regimen with actual food: powdered egg white, a cashew and seven Reese's Pieces. Jack's experience is similar to Anabelle's. She was in the same arm of the trial and now eats a daily dose of peanuts, walnuts and cashews to keep her protection up. But what happened to the Jennisons afterward shows that no peanut-allergy protection is perfect yet. Convincing a child to eat the same foods every day is no small task. First Jack refused his maintenance dose of cashew. After a while he started to resist the Reese's Pieces, too. The Jennisons live in Atlanta, the corporate home of Chick-fil-A, and seemingly every kid's birthday party features the restaurant's nuggets as well as a cake—which both contain eggs. 'For us, eggs are the most important,' Jennifer says. 'I still feel more comfortable with the cross-contamination risk of peanut knowing that he had built up a tolerance. But for now we're back to avoidance.' Because new approaches to desensitization have worked so well for severely affected kids, researchers have begun to address the needs of those who are somewhat less allergic. For instance, some kids can eat half a peanut before suffering a reaction. That's a tiny amount from the perspective of a nonallergic person, but it's a huge, life-threatening dose to a highly allergic one. Such people, whom some immunologists call 'high threshold,' include possibly 800,000 kids with peanut allergies just in the U.S. But their triggers are so different from those of highly allergic people that they had been excluded from some trials of desensitization strategies. Indeed, immunology didn't have a clear understanding of whether desensitization that started from their baseline would even achieve the same results as in highly allergic kids. All of that is now changing because after years of diagnosing patients in this class, medical practitioners could perceive that the group was being left behind. 'We would have children who maybe would eat half of a serving before they would start to have symptoms,' Sicherer says. 'And what we would tell those individuals is: 'Your symptoms weren't so bad, so you're not really that much in danger. You still need to avoid it, but if there were a small accident, maybe you would be okay.'' Jackson Esteves was 10 months old when his parents discovered his allergies. His mother, Holly, who was so thoughtful about her children's diets that she made her own baby food, was starting to introduce him to solids. She made a spinach pancake for her older daughter, slid a few morsels onto Jackson's high-chair tray, and then watched in horror as raised red hives rippled down his body. The pancake contained eggs, and tests showed that Jackson was allergic to them—and to dairy, sesame, tree nuts and peanuts. The diagnosis sent the Esteveses, who live on Long Island in New York State, hurtling into a landscape familiar to other allergy families. 'I was suddenly attuned to every food label,' Holly says now, 10 years later. 'I was learning how to modify recipes. I became very insecure in social settings, family parties, birthday parties. I had to bring everything for him.' What made it even more complex was that no one else in the family—Jackson's parents, his older sister, or a younger sister who was born soon after the pancacke incident—shared Jackson's allergies. The Esteves family didn't know it at the time, but Jackson's allergies concealed a kernel of promise. Although he was extremely reactive to some foods, medicine considered him just minimally allergic to peanuts—and that made him eligible for a new trial launched by Sicherer and a team of researchers from several institutions, called CAFETERIA. (Allergy researchers seem to be exceptionally fond of complex acronyms. 'CAFETERIA' comes from 'Challenging to Foods with Escalating Thresholds for Reducing Food Allergy.' The Xolair study was known as OUtMATCH, which stood for 'Omalizumab as Monotherapy and as Adjunct Therapy to Multi-Allergen Oral Immunotherapy in Food Allergic Children and Adults.') Starting in 2019, children between four and 14 years old consumed escalating doses of peanut butter, first under medical supervision and then at home, first with a carefully measured eighth of a teaspoon and increasing every eight weeks until they were consuming one tablespoon daily. Then they were asked to eat two tablespoons of peanut butter—the amount that would go in a sandwich, which an allergic child would never try to consume—every week for 16 weeks but not necessarily in daily doses. Finally, they had to refrain for eight weeks before being tested a final time. It worked. Among the 32 kids in the peanut-eating arm of the study (as opposed to a control group that avoided peanuts), every child achieved the study's final goal of consuming the equivalent of about three tablespoons of peanut butter without a reaction. That result was 'amazing,' says Patricia Fulkerson, chief of the food-allergy section of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funded the escalation study. 'A 100 percent response rate is hard not to be happy with.' The study's authors say it needs to be repeated in more kids and at different medical centers. Jackson, who turned 11 this year, has been able to eat peanuts safely since he completed his participation in CAFETERIA; he'll even eat a PB&J once in a while, although it is not a favorite food. Most of his allergies to other foods remain unaffected, but 'he was a success story' all the same, his mother says. 'He's over peanut allergy.' Even though the CAFETERIA study worked at its small scale and the different approach in the OUtMATCH trial resulted in an FDA drug approval, those tests and others share a limiting feature: they are hard for both the children going through them and the parents guiding them. The kids have to push themselves to swallow something that has made them ill in the past and that still, even in tiny doses, might produce an unpleasant reaction. Parents have to endure the stress of watching their children undergo food challenges to test their progress, knowing that life-threatening anaphylaxis might result. Plus, for highly allergic people, the most that desensitization can offer is to keep them safer, not completely safe. 'Ultimately we're not curing the allergy,' Vickery says. 'We're kind of providing a protective shell around the patient, a way to defend them against an accidental exposure. They're still reading labels, they're still avoiding the food, they are still carrying their epinephrine.' What families long for is something that could make peanut allergy just go away. A newly proposed treatment might manage that by rewriting the immune system's memory of antigens—although research into it is in such early stages that results have been reported for only one patient, and the first small clinical trial is just beginning. The treatment involves successive administration of two drugs, both made by biotechnology company Regeneron. The first drug, dupilumab (marketed as Dupixent), is a monoclonal antibody that is already FDA-approved for treating moderate to severe eczema and asthma and a few other conditions; it works by blocking the action of specific cytokines, signaling proteins that encourage the production of IgE. The second, linvoseltamab, is also an antibody and recently received FDA approval for treating relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. This cancer affects plasma cells, a category of white blood cell that produces antibodies, including IgE. Investigators initially thought that dupilumab could be a solo treatment for peanut allergy. But several trials showed that although peanut-specific IgE levels went down under its influence, there was no long-term practical benefit. Even immediately after a course of the drug in one trial, participants were unable to tolerate peanuts. In another test, drug recipients showed improved peanut tolerance right away, but it dropped three months later. IgE availability bounced back. That led researchers to look at the second drug, which deals a mortal blow to the cells where IgE is manufactured. In mice and monkeys, administering a dose of linvoseltamab during an ongoing course of dupilumab destroyed the cells producing IgE. Continuing the dupilumab while the plasma cells grew back suppressed allergic inflammation and kept the animals' immune systems from restarting the overreactions. 'This is very different than other approaches of trying to build tolerance in patients or trying to just decrease IgE,' says Jennifer Maloney, who leads Regeneron's therapeutic work on immune, inflammatory and infectious diseases. 'This is something that potentially could remove that allergic antibody from the person.' The company has shared results from just one patient so far, a 20-year-old man with multiple severe allergies. Regeneron described his treatment at the J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2025, documenting a dramatic drop in his IgE production during the dupilumab course and after the linvoseltamab was given. His case has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but the company is now recruiting a small group of patients for an early-phase trial that will primarily test safety. Vickery plans to enroll one patient at Emory, where linvoseltamab is already being used to treat cancer patients. 'We're going to learn something really important,' he says. 'If we wanted to cure the disease and make it go away, would this be a viable approach to doing so? If it doesn't work, we're going to learn things about why it didn't work and what we might need to do in the next trial.' There is another goal of peanut-allergy science. It's the ultimate goal: prevention, not desensitization or cure. And that may be possible for children being born now, thanks to a British study that has been running for more than a decade—and to a snack. In the early 2000s Gideon Lack, an immunologist then at Imperial College London, went to Tel Aviv to give a talk on how food allergies were rising around the world. He asked the audience, all Israeli pediatricians and allergists, how many of them had treated children with peanut allergy. From his own experience in the U.K., he expected every hand to shoot up. Only a few did. This low show of hands was extraordinary, and it immediately presented an opportunity to ask why the U.K. and Israel were so different. After returning home, Lack set up a survey to compare national rates of peanut allergy. To rule out some undetected genetic difference in the Israeli kids, he chose to limit the survey to Jewish children, recruiting roughly 5,000 in each country. The results revealed that the occurrence of peanut allergy in Israeli kids was one-tenth the rate among U.K. ones. A second set of questions posed to a subset of the children, 77 in the U.K. and 99 in Israel, hinted at why the rates were so different. Before their first birthday, Israeli children frequently ate peanuts, often in a ubiquitous snack called Bamba—something like Cheetos but coated in peanut butter instead of cheese. By the time they were 14 months old, almost 80 percent of the Israeli children were eating at least a few grams of peanut protein every month. In contrast, 80 percent of the British children had never tasted peanuts. Early introduction clearly will prevent peanut allergy. 'It does work. It's the right thing to do.' —Gideon Lack, King's College London It made sense that kids in the U.K. weren't eating peanuts because at the time, medical authorities there and in the U.S. recommended that allergy-causing foods be kept out of the diets of children from allergy-prone families until they were three years old. Lack and his team wondered whether the Israeli experience showed that this well-meaning advice might be wrong. They set up a fresh study, recruiting families with infants who were between four and 10 months old and had severe eczema or showed evidence of egg allergy, signs that their IgE production was already disrupted. The babies were tested for preexisting peanut allergy, and if they were negative, they went into one of two groups. The families of one group were told to keep their children from eating peanuts until they were five years old. The rest of the families were encouraged to introduce their kids to peanut products, preferably Bamba or peanut butter. When the investigators tested the children five years later, the differences were stark. Among the children told to avoid peanuts, 13.7 percent developed peanut allergies. Among the children who began eating peanuts early, only 1.9 percent did—an 86 percent difference. Lack published the results in 2015, working with a team primarily from King's College London, where he had moved to research pediatric allergies. This study, called LEAP (for 'Learning Early About Peanut Allergy,' in a departure from long acronyms), caused an earthquake in allergy science. Anthony Fauci, at the time the director of NIAID, which helped to fund it, said it had 'the potential to transform how we approach food-allergy prevention.' Two more studies cemented the findings. In one, published the following year, children from both arms of the LEAP study were asked to not eat peanut products in their sixth year. Allergy rates rose further among the children who had refrained from peanuts all along, but children who started eating peanut products early maintained their low rates of allergy. In a third, published in 2024, the team went back to children who had been in the LEAP study and were at least 12 years old to check whether the preventive effect lasted. It had. In the group that refrained from peanuts up to age five, 15.4 percent were allergic to peanuts. In the group that ate peanut products early, only 4.4 percent had bad reactions. Early introduction 'overwhelmingly will prevent peanut allergy,' Lack says. 'It clearly has been shown that it does work. It's the right thing to do.' But there have been persistent challenges to implementing that idea. Health authorities no longer recommend that parents avoid feeding allergy-related foods for three years—but most national and international guidelines still recommend exclusive breastfeeding for six months, and the cultural pressure to maintain that time frame is immense. In 2019 the American Academy of Pediatrics did revise its guidance to allow the introduction of potential allergens at four to six months for children who seem likely to be at high risk, indicated by symptoms of eczema. Lack worries this approach doesn't provide exposure as early in life as the immune system needs; the children in the LEAP study and in an unrelated 2016 study of early introduction began peanut exposure at four and three months, respectively. 'To introduce peanuts effectively in a four-month-old baby, they need to be trained to eat solids already,' he says. 'If you start the weaning process at four months, then the baby may not get peanut butter in significant quantities until five to six months of age. And if it's a baby with eczema, it's too late.' The challenge of prevention at this point may be not the science of immunology but rather the science of implementation. Scientists have to persuade parents and health-care providers that it's safe to implement new knowledge. Immunologists and allergists are aware that early feeding prevents allergy. Pediatricians, who have to handle many additional issues in young children's lives, might not have caught up. But 'an allergist isn't going to see somebody who doesn't have peanut allergy already,' NIH's Fulkerson says. 'You have to get the pediatricians involved because they're the ones who see the babies first.' As many advances as there have been in the past decade, scientists worry that the fundamentals of peanut allergy still elude them. Why it exists, what triggers it, what keeps the immune system from outgrowing it—these basic questions remain unanswered. But the ability to tackle them is growing. 'This field is still relatively early in its development compared with oncology or respiratory medicine, which are targeting very specific biological pathways with very specific precision treatments,' Emory's Vickery says. 'We're not close to that yet. But can I see that on the horizon? Yes.' The very latest approaches may involve new technologies. At the University of California, Los Angeles, a team led by Andre Nel has developed a lipid nanoparticle that uses mRNA—the same technology used in the COVID vaccines that were developed rapidly in 2020—to create fragments of peanut allergens. Those fragments are presented to specific cells. In mice, the treatment damped down the IgE cascade that triggers anaphylaxis. But this is a difficult time for biomedical research, given political decisions in the White House and its newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cancel much of the science emanating from the NIH and the National Science Foundation. Peanut allergy may be due for particular attention from the Trump administration. The president's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has several times endorsed an unsupported contention that peanut allergy is caused by childhood vaccinations. Earlier this year 'peanut allergies' appeared on a list of topics that would cause grants to get extra scrutiny within the NIH. Despite the potential political interference, for now the future seems bright for patients such as Anabelle Terry. As she grows up, the science that has reduced the risks of her allergy is growing along with her. It already has improved her life. It might one day change it for good. 'If I go off to summer camp, I have to go away from the other kids for a while and take my nuts to make sure nobody else who has a nut allergy gets sick,' she says. 'Going on vacations, I always have to bring a giant bag of nuts with me in my backpack. It would feel pretty nice just being able to go in for a little visit and just get a shot. That would let off a big burden.'
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- CNBC
Novo Nordisk shares pop after Wegovy receives U.S. approval for liver disease
Shares of Novo Nordisk climbed Monday after the company's blockbuster Wegovy obesity drug received accelerated approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat a serious liver disease. The company on Friday said that it was granted approval for the treatment of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) in adults with moderate to advanced liver fibrosis, in combination with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity. Shares climbed further in afternoon trade after the company said that it would reduce the cost of Ozempic for cash-paying patients to $499 per month, less than half of its monthly U.S. list price. Novo Nordisk shares were up 7.4% by 2:25 p.m. London time (9:25 a.m. E.T.). The approval makes Wegovy the first GLP-1 class treatment to be authorized for MASH, a progressive liver condition that affects an estimated 5% of U.S. adults, according to the American Liver Foundation. It also advances the drug's applications beyond diabetes and obesity treatment and develops its presence in the metabolic disease market. The approval follows a series of studies indicating the drug's efficacy in reducing the risk of heart attack, stroke and death from cardiovascular causes. "Wegovy is now uniquely positioned as the first and only GLP-1 treatment approved for MASH, complementing the already proven weight loss, cardiovascular benefits and extensive body of evidence linked to semaglutide," Martin Holst Lange, Novo Nordisk executive vice president, chief scientific officer and head of research and development, said in a statement. The accelerated approval was based on the first phase of the ESSENCE trial, in which Novo Nordisk said Wegovydemonstrated "a statistically significant and superior improvement" in liver fibrosis compared to placebo. Under the study, the company said almost two-thirds (62.9%) of people treated with Wegovy achieved the resolution of steatohepatitis with no worsening of liver fibrosis, compared to 34.3% who were administered a placebo. More than one-third (36.8%) of those treated with Wegovy achieved improvement in liver fibrosis with no worsening of steatohepatitis after 72 weeks, compared to 22.4% who received a placebo. The second phase of the study is expected in 2029. Novo Nordisk said Friday that Wegovy would be immediately available in the U.S. for MASH. The only other MASH treatment currently approved by the FDA is Madrigal Pharmaceuticals' Rezdiffra, which was cleared in 2024.
