SA tops another list, but its sting could kill you
A new clinic is tackling some of the worst rates of allergies in the world in SA, as children with life-threatening anaphylaxis wait months for help.
Canberra-headquartered Austral Allergy will open a dedicated allergy clinic in Adelaide next Monday, in its bid to tackle the high prevalence of allergy in South Australia.
Dr Chris McCue, who is founder and CEO of Austral Allergy, which he describes as a “network of multidisciplinary allergy clinics”, said that South Australia has some of the worst rates of food and environmental allergy in the world, but that access to care was lacking.
“So, all those folks who have problems with dogs and cats and dust and grasses, those problems are more likely to occur here than anywhere else,” he said, adding that one in three Australians suffers from an allergic disease such as eczema, asthma, bee stings, hay fever or food allergies.
“We had patients showing up every week who were travelling to Canberra from Adelaide to get medical care because something was wrong with their child, with themselves, with their family member, and when they’d looked for help locally, they’d been told that waitlists exceeded a year.”
McCue said there were eight million people in Australia with allergic diseases, but just 286 immunologists across the country, saying “the patients we were seeing [in Canberra] were not an isolated group but rather representative of a much larger problem”.
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The new clinic will be located at 72 O’Connell Street, North Adelaide, and will treat all kinds of allergies, from grass pollen to peanut allergies, penicillin allergies to eczema and metal allergies.
It will offer skin prick testing for environmental allergies, food allergy testing and management, and medication management, he said, as well as finding the root cause of allergic diseases, which has been a growing area of interest over the past 20 to 30 years.
“Our aim is to help people modify the impact of their allergies so that there’s no longer any impact on their lives,” McCue said.
“We want them to know that they can enjoy all of the same experiences as somebody who doesn’t have allergies, that we can help them take control of the mistake their bodies have made in developing the allergy in the first place and enable them to live without concern for it.”
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Austral Allergy’s Adelaide clinic will be led by Dr Sharmila Padhye, Dr Anusha Krishnamoorthy and Dr Kathi Nyberg, as well as a rotating roster of interstate specialists, including paediatric immunologists and GP allergists.
McCue said Nyberg has a “wealth of experience” in paediatrics, while Padhye is passionate about food and environmental allergies and Krishnamoorthy, whole-of-life span care.
When asked why Australia has some of the highest rates of food and environmental allergy in the world, McCue said there were a range of factors, including the incorrect advice given 20 years ago to delay the introduction of foods that were a high allergy risk.
He said there was not a huge difference in the prevalence of allergy in terms of gender, but that it was more common in younger people and those of Asian and Caucasian ethnicity.
Asked why he started Austral Allergy, McCue said it was because he was “really frustrated” about the lack of access to care for allergies in Australia, saying some children with “urgent” problems such as anaphylaxis were waiting months to be seen.
“I continued to have this challenge getting care for patients with allergies, and it’s a more common problem than people think,” he said.
McCue said that Austral Allergy helps support businesses to set up, supports doctors and nurses to get training and supports with the business model and operations back end, “so that the doctor isn’t sitting around worrying about payroll stubs or how many lockers they’ve got in the building – they’re not arguing over parking spaces”.
Austral Allergy has been running for the past six years and has its main base in Canberra.
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