New | Hong Kong has a serious lack of allergy specialists: journal
A Hong Kong Medical Journal article says the city has one allergy specialist for every 1.46 million people - far behind other developed countries. Specialists say that has a heavy toll.
When Julian Ngai was five years old, he sipped a teaspoon of milk and suddenly stopped breathing. His mother Sandra Lai Pui-ling was terrified as an unconscious Ngai had to be sent to the intensive care unit, where he was administered extra oxygen.
It had been part of a traumatic – but life-saving – allergy test he was given at the Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, with doctors later concluding he had severe reactions to dairy, particularly eggs, as well as peanuts.
Since then, Ngai, now 10, only eats food his family has packed for him – even when they are going out to a restaurant. There are rare exceptions with restaurants where they know the food doesn’t contain anything he’ll react to, like the fries at McDonald’s. He has also undergone six months of treatment which helped him recover from his egg allergy.
He has even gotten to the point where he can eat one egg a day. “Once he’s tasted an egg, he always wants to eat them in front of other people to prove that he’s over the allergies,” says his mother, who is an accountant.
Ngai’s parents got him tested for allergies shortly after he was born in Canada. By then, they knew he had food allergies, but got him tested again at Queen Mary Hospital when he was older because some children will just get over their allergies at that age.
“Now he’s very happy because he can finally taste eggs. He says even raw eggs taste good,” says his father, Andrew Ngai, adding that Julian has not had an allergic episode in three years.
Hong Kong Allergy association chairman Marco Ho, a child immunology and infectious diseases specialist at Queen Mary, suggests Ngai is one of the lucky ones. The lack of allergy specialists in the city means that desensitisation treatments like Julian’s are not easy to come by.