Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Construction of Risks and Remedies in Food Allergy Science

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Under the supervision of Prof. Michael Lynch, Ph.D. candidate Danya Glabau will conduct ethnographic research to understand how people with food allergies, patient advocacy organization staff, and physicians conceive of "safety" for food allergic people and how they use treatment technologies to manage the risks to life posed by the illness. The co-PI will conduct semi-structured interviews with members of these three groups, observation of biomedical allergy treatment, participant observation in an online food allergy support community, and participant observation at three allergy-related conferences, to learn how patients understand and deploy three treatment strategies: epinephrine injections, immunotherapy, and elimination diets.The broader impacts of this project include improved communication between clinicians and patients and important contributions to the clinical literature on allergy. The most efficacious treatment strategy, eliminating allergenic foods from the diet of allergic people, requires both individual and collective actions. The individual must take care to avoid foods they are allergic to; but this is only possible if food manufacturers uniformly and consistently disclose ingredients and processing conditions on food labels and if there are mechanisms by which to exclude allergens from public spaces. Understanding what individual and collective measures would most effectively safeguard the health of Americans with chronic conditions is important. By amplifying patient voices, this project will offer a platform for a relatively common but often overlooked patient constituency to contribute to identification of new approaches. The co PI will also identify existing weaknesses of food allergy treatment strategies and communicate these to the life science entrepreneurship community in the hopes of fostering collaborations that might lead to advances in nutrition substitutes or food processing methods that are healthy, palatable, and safe for people with food allergies who otherwise struggle to maintain a balanced diet.