Allergy Research and Treatments: Government Support

Debate between Jim Shannon and Christian Matheson

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Christian Matheson]

That is an awful situation. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s family. That three times in three years is a shocking statistic, which we will come back to because there is a burgeoning rise in allergic disease in the UK. It is an issue of great importance to people across the country, as the recent parliamentary petition demonstrated. Indeed, I thank the Petitions Committee for incorporating that petition into the debate.

It is estimated that here in the UK one in three people are living with allergies and 3 million with food allergies. It is not only about food allergies. I was contacted today by a lady called Sue. She, her daughter and her grandson have a latex allergy. Her daughter has had to write, on behalf of her son—Sue’s grandson—to all the manufacturers of school sportswear equipment to find out whether their equipment contains latex, because of that allergy. Her daughter has lost 3½ stone in two years because of her allergies and has finally, after about two and a half to three years, got a treatment. However, it should not take that long.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. My second son was born with allergies, and has just the one now—I am thankful that he managed to grow out of some of them. Does the hon. Member agree that as one in four people suffer from some type of basic allergy, and have to live their lives with medication to deal with the symptoms, we must see extra investment into research on the varied multitude of allergies that people are suffering from throughout the UK?

[Christian Matheson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I absolutely agree. Research shows that in the 20 years to 2012, there was a 615% increase in hospital admissions in the UK for anaphylaxis, a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction mainly caused by food allergies.

Members may be familiar with a tragic list of recent fatalities, mostly of young people, from anaphylaxis: Sadie Bristow, aged nine; Shanté Turay-Thomas, 18; Karanbir Cheema, 13; Ava-Grace Stevens, nine; James Atkinson, 23; Owen Carey, 18; Ellen Raffell, 16; and, of course, Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, 15. Those are just some of the entirely avoidable deaths we have witnessed in recent years.

Thankfully, because of the powerful campaign run by Nadim and Tanya Ednan-Laperouse, Natasha’s parents, we now have a new allergen and ingredient-labelling law in the UK, known as Natasha’s law. It will save lives and prevent others from suffering the terrible grief that those families will always bear. I pay tribute to the Government in this case for their swift response in ending the loophole in the law that Natasha’s death—caused by sesame seeds hidden in a baguette—exposed. I am sure that the Government’s actions on that are welcomed throughout the House.

Much more needs to be done. I will highlight two areas where I challenge Ministers, in this time of great need, to rise up and offer real hope to hundreds of thousands of families who live daily with the fear of a loved one suffering a severe—or worse, fatal—anaphylactic reaction: research and treatment. Turning to the latter, for too long allergy services have been the Cinderella services in our healthcare system. There is a national postcode lottery, and too many patients take too long to get specialist appointments, as we heard from Sue who emailed me. There are too few specialist allergy clinics, too few specialist allergy doctors and consultants and too little training for GPs. The pathway between GP and hospital allergy services is deeply disjointed. No specific treatment for allergies is readily available in the UK, and an individualised avoidance strategy with an adrenaline auto-injector is the only practical advice offered. That negatively affects quality of life.

The care that people with allergies receive is at best patchy, and at worst has led to avoidable deaths. Without greater priority given to allergies, those problems will continue and sadly more lives might be lost unnecessarily. Those are just a few of the reasons why colleagues on the all-party parliamentary group for allergy recently published their excellent report calling for the appointment of a national lead on allergy. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Jon Cruddas) for his dedicated work and leadership on the matter—he may seek to intervene later in the debate.

That is also the view of the Ednan-Laperouses’ charity, the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, which has ran an excellent campaign calling for an allergy tsar. That was also the topic of the petition considered in this debate —someone to work across Government to tackle those issues. It is fair to say that the allergy community—patients, families, charities and the clinicians—are united as one in believing that there is an urgent need for a national lead to be appointed. I know that the Minister of State recently met members of the APPG and the national strategy group. I ask the Minister what plans the Government have on the appointment of a national lead on allergies. I hope that the Minister can provide the leadership and drive that the allergy community has called for.

Turning now to the matter of research, I urge the Minister to respond to the request from the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation for a meeting, sent in early January. There is a strong belief in the scientific community that, given the right amount of research funding, in the next couple of decades treatments can be found that could potentially eradicate allergies. I am aware that the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation intends to be a lead player in the research field and in its mission to make allergy history. I take the opportunity to thank everyone at the foundation for all the crucial work they have already done in the field. I understand that they will shortly announce their first research project, a £2.2 million study across five university hospital sites in England. That investment is roughly the same as the Government have donated as a whole to allergy research funding over the last five years.

If I may quote the Minister, on 29 October, she stated:

“Over the past five years, the Department of Health and Social Care has awarded the National Institute for Health Research over £2 million for research into food allergies.”—[Official Report, 29 October 2021; Vol. 702, c. 597.]

I am fearful that this is not sufficient. Without enough funding, there is not enough research. Without research, there is no treatment. Without treatment there is no change for the millions of people and families affected. I ask the Minister why, given the acknowledged growing epidemic of allergies in this country, research funding is not being given a significantly higher priority? Why is research into food allergic disease so underfunded compared with other diseases? Will the Minister consider other areas of allergy such as, for example, the case of latex that I mentioned earlier?

I am aware that the Food Standards Agency is undertaking a research programme into food allergy and intolerance, but it is not researching cause and prevention or developing treatments. I am also aware that the Department for Education is currently running a food standards pilot. However, flying in the face of the evidence from staff in our schools of a food allergy epidemic, it has not even bothered to include food allergy in its remit. That is another example of how individuals with food allergies are being forgotten and excluded. That is another reason why, as the petition states, we need an allergy tsar to work across all the Departments and Government agencies.

The Natasha Allergy Research Foundation is heavily leveraging the major food companies to help fund and play their part. They cannot do that work alone. I, and many others, believe that the Government now need to show direction and deliver investment into food allergy research, including cause, prevention and treatments. We need to be moving, and at pace. We should not be waiting for other young lives to be tragically lost before we step up to the mark.

Christmas Adjournment

Debate between Jim Shannon and Christian Matheson

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is always a real pleasure to follow the gallant gentleman, the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). I wholeheartedly support his comments, and those of the hon. Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti); I think they resonate with everyone in the House. We all want the prosecutions and investigations to stop.

May I first associate myself and my party, the Democratic Unionist party, with the comments that have been made about all those who have lost loved ones in the awfulness of the unspeakable attack, so close to a church, in Berlin? We offer our sincere sympathies. It is good that we remember, at this time of year, those who grieve.

In the short time available, I want to speak about making a difference. I also want to focus on this time of the year. I am one of those guys who loves Christmas. I love taking my grandchildren to special church services, attending services in different churches and just remembering the real reason for the season: a chance to celebrate Jesus. We all know, in all reality, that 25 December is not just the day Jesus was born. It is a time to focus our minds on the greatest gift ever given to mankind: the Lord Jesus, the greatest story ever told.

Last week, I tabled an early-day motion on the real meaning of Christmas. Many Members took the opportunity to sign it and to endorse that comment. The Christmas message is the celebration of Jesus who came as a baby, grew to be a man and gave his life for those who would accept him into their hearts. I love the celebration of his birth, as I see it as a time for faith, for family and for focus. I want to thank the Lord Jesus for the personal faith that I have.

I thank God for the time that I spend over Christmas with my family: with my wife and the boys, my granddaughters and my mother. I take the two days as days to be with them. I cherish the time to laugh—and to be laughed at!—and just to be in each other’s company all together. Finally, I see it as a time when I refocus on what is important and on what I need to do. It is a time when I think on my role and how I can make a difference in my own family, my own community and my own constituency.

The hon. Member for Beckenham spoke about our soldiers. While we are in this House, Army, RAF and Navy personnel, and those in the emergency services—the police, fire and ambulance services—are all working to protect us. We should put that on the record.

As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am the chair of the all-party group on international freedom of religion or belief. I want to focus on and pray for persecuted Christians across the world who cannot worship their God as we will this Christmas, and to think of the 100,000 Christians who will be killed for their faith this year, the 200 million who will be persecuted and the 2 billion who live in an endangered neighbourhood. Those are the facts of where we are.

It is Christmas time and we all enjoy a good Christmas movie. “It’s a Wonderful Life” starring James Stewart is a great film that could probably epitomise the life of every person in the Chamber and every person we meet out in the street, because every person’s life has an effect on everyone else. When I think about making a difference, I want to focus on that. I will relate a quick story to illustrate that, which I believe carries a lesson for us all.

An old man used to go to the ocean to do his writing. Early one morning, he was walking along the shore after a big storm had passed and found the vast beach littered with starfish in both directions as far as the eye could see. Off in the distance, the old man noticed a small boy approaching, wearing his wellington boots and carrying a bucket. As the boy walked, he paused every so often. As he grew closer, the man could see that he was occasionally bending down to pick up an object, put it into his bucket and take it into the sea. The boy came closer still and the man called out, “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?” The young boy paused, looked up and replied, “Taking starfish into the ocean. The tide has washed them up on to the beach and they can’t return to the sea by themselves. When the sun gets high, they will die unless I take them back to the water.” The old man said, “But there must be tens of thousands of starfish on the beach, and I am afraid that you will not be able to make much of a difference.” The young boy bent down and picked up yet another starfish, put it into his bucket and took it out to the sea as far as he could. Then he turned, smiled and said, “Ah, yes, but I can make a difference to this one.” People may raise their eyebrows—

[Christian Matheson]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his inspiring story. I would like to pay tribute to his work on the all-party group on freedom of religion or belief. It is my belief that he is making a difference to people across the world, and for that, I am most grateful to him.

[Hon. Members]

Hear, hear.