Last year, the National Allergy Strategy launched the pilot phase of an Australian food allergy prevention project ‘Nip Allergies in the Bub’. A 12-month pilot was conducted in Western Australia as a world-first promotion of new childhood allergy prevention strategies. Following successful completion of the trial period, the program has now been launched nationally.
The web-based program aims to educate both parents and health care providers on the latest recommendations for how to introduce common allergens to babies to help prevent the development of food allergies. This includes feeding children these foods by one year of age.
It is hoped the program will help increase the number of parents implementing the allergy prevention guidelines for their infants, and thereby reduce the number of children developing food allergies. While it is too early to tell whether these measures have had an impact, data is being collected and will be evaluated over time to track changes in allergy prevalence.
The media release relating to the national roll-out of the program has more information and links to the allergy prevention website.
