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

在Michael Lynch教授的指导下，博士候选人Danya Glabau将进行人种学研究，以了解食物过敏者、患者倡导组织工作人员和医生如何看待食物过敏者的“安全”，以及他们如何使用治疗技术来管理疾病带来的生命风险。联合主要研究者将对这三个小组的成员进行半结构化访谈，观察生物医学过敏治疗，在线食物过敏支持社区的参与者观察，以及三个过敏相关会议的参与者观察，以了解患者如何理解和部署三种治疗策略：肾上腺素注射免疫疗法该项目更广泛的影响包括改善临床医生和患者之间的沟通以及对临床文献的重要贡献关于过敏症。最有效的治疗策略，从过敏人群的饮食中消除过敏性食物，需要个人和集体的行动。个人必须注意避免他们过敏的食物;但这只有在食品制造商统一和一致地在食品标签上披露成分和加工条件，以及有机制将过敏原排除在公共场所之外的情况下才有可能。了解哪些个人和集体措施将最有效地保护美国慢性病患者的健康是很重要的。通过放大病人的声音，该项目将为一个相对常见但往往被忽视的病人群体提供一个平台，以帮助确定新的方法。 共同PI还将确定食物过敏治疗策略的现有弱点，并将其传达给生命科学创业社区，希望促进合作，从而可能导致营养替代品或食品加工方法的进步，这些方法对食物过敏的人来说是健康的，可口的，安全的，否则他们很难保持均衡的饮食。

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.