Temporary fix helps patients around drug allergy

WASHINGTON - Having a bad reaction to penicillin as a infant doesn't guarantee you are still allergic decades later. & if the oncologist says you must switch chemotherapies because of an allergic reaction, well, perhaps not.

More medical centers are recommending a lesser known choice: Drug desensitization, a carefully controlled system of helping patients temporarily tolerate medications - from aspirin to antibiotics to chemo - that their bodies one times rejected.

"You don't know how lucky I feel" to have been desensitized, says Vanessa Greenleaf of Marblehead, Mass.

Not everyone's a candidate. But for those who are, the system can mean the difference between getting the best treatment or a runner-up that may not do the job, says Dr. Mariana Castells, an allergist at Harvard & Brigham & Women's Hospital who helped pioneer the care.

"I kept mumbling, 'I require to stay on,'" recalls Greenleaf, 52, who finally got her wish. "All the nurses kept telling me, 'You can, we'll get the drug in to you safely.'"

Greenleaf developed a severe allergy to a mainstay of ovarian cancer treatment, carboplatin. Even as a burning sensation engulfed her body during the allergic attack, Greenleaf's chief fear was that doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital would take her off the chemo combination he believed her best shot.

Allergies make up 5 percent to 10 percent of all adverse reactions to medications, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. Sometimes drug allergies kill. So anyone who is ever reported an allergic reaction to a medicine, even decades earlier, is told seldom to take that drug.