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Article: Food allergy and food intolerance: specific versus innate immunity.
- Article from:
- Original Internist
- Article date:
- June 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Original Internist, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Nomenclature
The concept of allergy was fairly well understood when von Pirquet, an Austrian physician, first introduced the term in 1906. It was intended to denote an altered reaction to a normally innocuous substance. Two decades later allergists in Europe agreed to narrow the definition to apply only to such an altered reaction as may be characterized by an immediate onset of symptoms.
Contemporary physicians recognize a distinction between immediate and delayed-type altered reactions in their nomenclature by applying the terms, "intolerance" or "sensitivity" in the case of common reactions to foods and other chemicals where symptom onset is delayed ...