by Claudia Boyd-Barrett posted in Parenting

If you think your child is allergic to penicillin, there?s a good chance you could be wrong, according to a new study.
Testing of 100 children ages 5 through 12 whose parents said they had a mild penicillin allergy found that none of those children were genuinely allergic to the drug.
How is that possible" Study author Dr. David Vyles said many parents mistakenly attribute symptoms such as rashes to penicillin when they?re in fact caused by the child?s infection.
The researchers began their study by surveying almost 600 parents of children with a reported penicillin allergy who went through a hospital emergency department in Wisconsin. The parents answered questions about symptoms their children had experienced in the past after taking penicillin. About half of the parents reported low-risk symptoms such as a rash, itching, or diarrhea. Limited funding for the study meant the researchers could only test 100 of the kids with low-risk symptoms. Allergy testing involved a skin test, injecting a small dose of penicillin, and giving kids a small oral dose of the drug. All of the children were medically supervised during the procedures.

Again none ? zero- of the kids had an allergy, according to the findings published in Pediatrics. Those findings are similar to another recent study from Australia that found 81 percent of adults who believed they had a penicillin allergy actually didn?t.
Penicillin is often the first line of def...