New foods or fumes allergies post Covid infection?

[Katy131]

Has anybody else noticed new food or fumes allergies after a Covid 19 infection?

I've identified four more food allergies since my Covid infection a year ago in July 2022. My food diary confirms that I ate most of these foods during the infection. I've discovered other anecdotal evidence of the same thing and also new sensitivities to fumes from members of my Facebook group for EPD treatments. Is this a thing for those of us who are generally hypersensitive?

 

[linusbert]

yes.
maybe its chronic inflammation which adds overall potential.

i also get more allergies and worse asthma from b vitamins. if i eat certain things like plant extracts it adds up as well and make it worse and worse.

vitamin D can combat this, if you have a prolonged blood level above 40ng/ml it can over month and years desensitize again.
it worked for me once, even just days after.
but its not working anymore for me, i cannot get my blood levels beyond 10ng/ml.

 

[wolves2626]

some people come up with mcas type symptoms after covid. researchers also got some findings in Long-COVID and mcas could be related. upping vitamin d, quercetin vitamin c antihistamines may be beneficial. however seeing an immunologist amd allergist is a high priority. I am also a patient please get a doctors approval before using any supplements.

 

[Katy131]

yes.
maybe its chronic inflammation which adds overall potential.

i also get more allergies and worse asthma from b vitamins. if i eat certain things like plant extracts it adds up as well and make it worse and worse.

vitamin D can combat this, if you have a prolonged blood level above 40ng/ml it can over month and years desensitize again.
it worked for me once, even just days after.
but its not working anymore for me, i cannot get my blood levels beyond 10ng/ml.

Taking loads of Vitamin D and have been for years. I'm at optimal therapeutic doses of just about every vitamin and mineral you could name ...

 

[Katy131]

some people come up with mcas type symptoms after covid. researchers also got some findings in Long-COVID and mcas could be related. upping vitamin d, quercetin vitamin c antihistamines may be beneficial. however seeing an immunologist amd allergist is a high priority. I am also a patient please get a doctors approval before using any supplements.

Yes I've seen articles about the effect of Long Covid with an increase in sensitivities. I don't have Long Covid however and my infection was not too bad. I'm under the care of two doctors, one of whom is an allergy specialist so I'm lucky there. My supplement list is already huge 🤷‍♀️

 

[linusbert]

Taking loads of Vitamin D and have been for years. I'm at optimal therapeutic doses of just about every vitamin and mineral you could name ...

i take 40.000 iu per week for 3/4 year and my values are below 10ng/ml.
intake and uptake are two things.
how high are your blood levels?

 

[Katy131]

i take 40.000 iu per week for 3/4 year and my values are below 10ng/ml.
intake and uptake are two things.
how high are your blood levels?

It's not something I've had checked lately as it hasn't come up in conversations with my doctors. But as I've just spent nearly £500 on blood tests and consultation, it may have to wait a while longer!

 

[linusbert]

It's not something I've had checked lately as it hasn't come up in conversations with my doctors. But as I've just spent nearly £500 on blood tests and consultation, it may have to wait a while longer!

hey hey, i dont care if you check for vitamin d levels. just saying that this can help if blood levels are up. do whatever you feel is good and necessary for you, i do not know you for longer than 2 messages.

my doc also charged recently 500 EUR for 1 quartal of working, consisting of 150 eur in blood labs and the rest fictive psychotherapy sessions i never received.

 

[Tsukareta]

I actually read something somewhere ( in the past few months ) about viruses causing food sensitivities or allergies, my memory is poor though and I can't remember the source. https://www.allergyamulet.com/blog/can-viruses-be-linked-to-food-allergies-and-intolerances

Do you have MCS and did you have food sensitivity / supplement sensitivity before whenever you had a symptomatic covid infection ? I had chemical intolerances for a good 5 years or so ( the type which seem to be common in CFS ), varying level of reaction to an isolated and predictable set of things, certain types of rubber for example, common bleach and some cleaning chemicals, but I did not have 'multiple chemical sensitivity', and my intolerances were not a big impact on my life.

I only had food sensitivity for a brief period of a few months when I was severe / very severe towards the end of the first year of my CFS, then I returned to normal food and didn't really have many stomach issues or symptoms, I had stable moderate CFS for nearly 4 years during that time, so I was skeptical towards people who theorized CFS was due to stomach microbiome dysbiosis or leaky gut.

I didn't ( knowingly ) have Covid until august last year, and immediately after I didn't notice a difference, but my chemical sensitivities were gradually increasing in the latter half of 2022, but I don't necessarily think its correlated, I had many new health issues appearing last year prior to august, which I believe are caused partly by mold toxins / hypersensitivity, and possibly stomach dysbiosis / sibo. 18 months back in the winter of 2021 I had a bad flu like virus, gave me a 40c fever and trouble drinking and eating, but paramedic / hospital tests said it wasn't coronavirus ( which is rare for me since CFS to catch viruses such as colds ), and it was not long after that when I started noticing the new health issues, but the food sensitivities and allergies didn't start until a year later.

If you are having issues with food on a regular basis it could be caused by leaky gut, and I have heard a theory that MCS can be caused by leaky BBB, the two are related. I tested with GABA recently and I did feel obviously more relaxed, which isn't supposed to happen. L-glutamine may help but I wonder about that, some theories implicate NDMA receptor in the brain with MCS. I also hear talk about excitotoxicity and issues balancing the levels of these things in CFS patients. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1241647/

 

[lenora]

Hi....Bearing in mind that allergies can occur at any time in our lives, it does make sense that when the immune system is struggling allergies or other sensitivities could make an appearance.

How long have you had them, and has there been any change? Yours, Lenora

 

[Katy131]

hey hey, i dont care if you check for vitamin d levels. just saying that this can help if blood levels are up. do whatever you feel is good and necessary for you, i do not know you for longer than 2 messages.

my doc also charged recently 500 EUR for 1 quartal of working, consisting of 150 eur in blood labs and the rest fictive psychotherapy sessions i never received.

Sure, I didn't mean to come across as annoyed or anything - quite the opposite! Thanks for your input. It's scary how much this all costs, isn't it? Here in the UK, if you go private, as I've had to to get a proper diagnosis, there is no insurance either.

 

[Katy131]

Do you have MCS and did you have food sensitivity / supplement sensitivity before whenever you had a symptomatic covid infection ?

Yes I have Multiple Chemical and Food sensitivities, which I was diagnosed in 2010. I've been having EPD treatment since 2016 which has helped a lot in general but my food sensitivities remained much the same and since my Covid infection last year and this year I've had at least four new ones appear. It was only when I saw the anecdotal evidence from other people who have MCS and food allergies who have had new ones appear that I started to wonder about putting the two together.

If you are having issues with food on a regular basis it could be caused by leaky gut,

Yes, my allergy specialist thinks that originally my food sensitivities were caused by leaky gut, as part of my decades of illness. I've had fewer problems since I did the anti candida diet last year and took antifungals for 3 1/2 months. She also thinks that during my Covid infection I had temporary leaky gut which would explain the additional sensitivities, perhaps. If you're interested in the background, my intro thread is here: https://forums.phoenixrising.me/thr...king-for-help-on-methylation-currently.89849/

Thanks for the other interesting info too

 

[Katy131]

Do you have MCS and did you have food sensitivity / supplement sensitivity before whenever you had a symptomatic covid infection

Hi....Bearing in mind that allergies can occur at any time in our lives, it does make sense that when the immune system is struggling allergies or other sensitivities could make an appearance.

How long have you had them, and has there been any change? Yours, Lenora

I've had food allergies for around 10 years and over time they've been getting worse, although my health in general is improving, thanks to EPD treatment. My allergy specialist and I are trying to identify why this is. I'm setting up an appointment with her soon and will probably try an intensive daily desensitisation which she has mentioned at my last appointment.

 

[linusbert]

what is EPD?
i also have this recently where some symptoms are better, i am doing more over the day... but other annoying things like allergies and asthma get worse and other little shits come up as well like ear pressure and dizziness.

 

[Katy131]

what is EPD?

It's short for Enzyme Potentiated Desensitisation available in some places here in the UK but not well known generally. It's only available in a few private functional medicine clinics. Many people find it helps with food and other environmental allergies and I've found it very helpful in general for my CFS. https://drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/Enzyme_Potentiated_Desensitisation_(EPD)_-_how_it_works

 

[Tsukareta]

I was forced to live in an unhealthy and stressful environment back in 2020, before that point I was fairly healthy and active for someone with moderate CFS, my sensitivities were mild with a few exceptions. In that place in 2020 there was some sort of leak from high up on this building which ran down the outside wall creating a big puddle of foul smelling water on the ground outside the room I was in, this puddle and bad smell was there for weeks, it was around that time I started to get weird issues with my immune system, nausea, an abnormal intense burning in the throat when I was exposed to the usual seasonal pollen. Thankfully this period didn't last long and a month or 2 later I returned to my usual home, but after that point I noticed I was more reactive to the carpets, which were somewhat new but not too much of an issue back in 2019, I also now suddenly had unexplaianable periods of high stomach gas production that would come and go, and were closely related to CFS like crashes, I was crashing often which was unusual for me. Around early 2021 I also started to notice a decline in my cognitive function, particularly higher level stuff like drawing and studying foreign languages, and I noticed vision focus problems which I mistook as 'lazy eye'. Generally I was healthy throughout the year though and I was very physically active. It wasn't until 2022 that many new symptoms appeared, weak slow healing wrist joints, hypersensitivity to my bedroom that happened suddenly during a time of stress, which coincided with the onset of many strange neurological symptoms e.g. periods of dehydration, difficulty swallowing. I improved by switching bedrooms to the smaller one opposite but the symptoms never fully left, though some did improve going into autumn 2022.

This winter last A) the burning sensation to pollen from 2020 returned again a couple of times but this time it was when I crossed the biggest road in my town at times when the fumes were at their worst, my throat felt different for about an hour after these short exposures B) I started having more chemical sensitivity than usual, air fresheners and the laundry detergent / tumble dryer downstairs, eventually leading to another crisis where I became hypersensitive to the spare bedroom I was in and had to move downstairs to sleep on the sofa. It was at this point that my MCS started, and I began getting unpredictable face flushing and reactions to some foods.

I can't help but feel that all my current new problems ( which don't seem like regular CFS and are way beyond the few odd unique or unexplainable things I had back pre-2020 ) , are somehow to do with that change in environment I had back in 2020. Did something change in my body back then ? possibly my stomach because the first new symptom I had when returning home was episodes of extreme stomach gas ? did my microbiome change, or did I get a colonisation of some fungus somewhere in the body ? As I said I don't believe I had covid until august 2020, way after many of these new issues began, I rarely get viral infections like the cold since I first got CFS.

Edit - Some say that chronic health issues like mine can be caused by living with or even relatively brief exposures to ( certain types of highly toxic ) mold, but prior to last year I had no mold specific symptoms, and my hypersensitivity to mold was very occasional, certain locations, for example the black mold around PVC windows would set me off when I went to my cousins bedroom, but a simple cleaning completely solved that. I can now sense the mold in my kitchen and upstairs bathroom, but I doubt it has changed that much since 2 years ago or even 5 years ago. I had no sense of mold exposure when I was in the bad environment in 2020, whereas there is a building in my garden that became a problem for me back in 2018 due to rainwater intrusion / obvious water damage, so I know what mold exposure feels like for me, and I didn't feel that way at the place I was at in 2020, nor did I experience any of the mold specific symptoms or a general long change to my health when I began becoming reactive to this building in my garden.

 

[linusbert]

I was forced to live in an unhealthy and stressful environment back in 2020, before that point I was fairly healthy and active for someone with moderate CFS, my sensitivities were mild with a few exceptions. In that place in 2020 there was some sort of leak from high up on this building which ran down the outside wall creating a big puddle of foul smelling water on the ground outside the room I was in, this puddle and bad smell was there for weeks, it was around that time I started to get weird issues with my immune system, nausea, an abnormal intense burning in the throat when I was exposed to the usual seasonal pollen. Thankfully this period didn't last long and a month or 2 later I returned to my usual home, but after that point I noticed I was more reactive to the carpets, which were somewhat new but not too much of an issue back in 2019, I also now suddenly had unexplaianable periods of high stomach gas production that would come and go, and were closely related to CFS like crashes, I was crashing often which was unusual for me. Around early 2021 I also started to notice a decline in my cognitive function, particularly higher level stuff like drawing and studying foreign languages, and I noticed vision focus problems which I mistook as 'lazy eye'. Generally I was healthy throughout the year though and I was very physically active. It wasn't until 2022 that many new symptoms appeared, weak slow healing wrist joints, hypersensitivity to my bedroom that happened suddenly during a time of stress, which coincided with the onset of many strange neurological symptoms e.g. periods of dehydration, difficulty swallowing. I improved by switching bedrooms to the smaller one opposite but the symptoms never fully left, though some did improve going into autumn 2022.

This winter last A) the burning sensation to pollen from 2020 returned again a couple of times but this time it was when I crossed the biggest road in my town at times when the fumes were at their worst, my throat felt different for about an hour after these short exposures B) I started having more chemical sensitivity than usual, air fresheners and the laundry detergent / tumble dryer downstairs, eventually leading to another crisis where I became hypersensitive to the spare bedroom I was in and had to move downstairs to sleep on the sofa. It was at this point that my MCS started, and I began getting unpredictable face flushing and reactions to some foods.

I can't help but feel that all my current new problems ( which don't seem like regular CFS and are way beyond the few odd unique or unexplainable things I had back pre-2020 ) , are somehow to do with that change in environment I had back in 2020. Did something change in my body back then ? possibly my stomach because the first new symptom I had when returning home was episodes of extreme stomach gas ? did my microbiome change, or did I get a colonisation of some fungus somewhere in the body ? As I said I don't believe I had covid until august 2020, way after many of these new issues began, I rarely get viral infections like the cold since I first got CFS.

Edit - Some say that chronic health issues like mine can be caused by living with or even relatively brief exposures to ( certain types of highly toxic ) mold, but prior to last year I had no mold specific symptoms, and my hypersensitivity to mold was very occasional, certain locations, for example the black mold around PVC windows would set me off when I went to my cousins bedroom, but a simple cleaning completely solved that. I can now sense the mold in my kitchen and upstairs bathroom, but I doubt it has changed that much since 2 years ago or even 5 years ago. I had no sense of mold exposure when I was in the bad environment in 2020, whereas there is a building in my garden that became a problem for me back in 2018 due to rainwater intrusion / obvious water damage, so I know what mold exposure feels like for me, and I didn't feel that way at the place I was at in 2020, nor did I experience any of the mold specific symptoms or a general long change to my health when I began becoming reactive to this building in my garden.

i can almost relate to everything. had this this year too.
it became better when they stopped using desinfectants in my nursing home.

i get problems everytime we switch bed sheets. it seams to be the chemical cleansing. then i reacted even more to normal detergens.
rooms with wet cloth like bedrooms or were clothes are much i get this weird smell and stuffy nose. maybe try to get rid of all cloth for a time to check if this is the problem. i am desperately trying to fix this issue but its almost impossible, already thought about sleeping on a massage bank without any cloth.

also this year i have record low vitamin D levels, actually starting last year. in the sub 5 ng/ml area. i cannot even get it up with 40.000 iu per week. desperately trying to fix this too, i believe this hyper sensitizing to everything comes from the D deficiency. people should have above 40 ng/ml blood levels constantly and then immune system should slowly revert back to a more normal state over month and years.
and i can confirm, when i had 88ng/ml in 2017 , i dont know how i did it, it was just low like now around 15ng/ml and out of a sudden it was 88ng/ml. in this time i had the least allergy problems ever. i could even eat things again i was allergic since a long time.
i wish i could get back to this levels.

calcium is very important to fight allergies. you might try to pop some calcium and see if it helps, you should get immediate relief. i cant sadly not do this as calcium makes my muscle symptoms much worse.

 

[Tsukareta]

i can almost relate to everything. had this this year too.
it became better when they stopped using desinfectants in my nursing home.

i get problems everytime we switch bed sheets. it seams to be the chemical cleansing. then i reacted even more to normal detergens.
rooms with wet cloth like bedrooms or were clothes are much i get this weird smell and stuffy nose. maybe try to get rid of all cloth for a time to check if this is the problem. i am desperately trying to fix this issue but its almost impossible, already thought about sleeping on a massage bank without any cloth.

also this year i have record low vitamin D levels, actually starting last year. in the sub 5 ng/ml area. i cannot even get it up with 40.000 iu per week. desperately trying to fix this too, i believe this hyper sensitizing to everything comes from the D deficiency. people should have above 40 ng/ml blood levels constantly and then immune system should slowly revert back to a more normal state over month and years.
and i can confirm, when i had 88ng/ml in 2017 , i dont know how i did it, it was just low like now around 15ng/ml and out of a sudden it was 88ng/ml. in this time i had the least allergy problems ever. i could even eat things again i was allergic since a long time.
i wish i could get back to this levels.

calcium is very important to fight allergies. you might try to pop some calcium and see if it helps, you should get immediate relief. i cant sadly not do this as calcium makes my muscle symptoms much worse.

When I have the MCS issue ( new ), it feels like certain chemicals go straight to my brain and cause a sort of weird headache basically instantly as in the case of the upstairs bathroom when my dad started bathing with these highly fragrant Dove bath salts. My brain felt very fragile and easily disturbed / inflamed which would remain for quite a while after the exposure.

Back in Jan / Feb I was beginning to react to new things every fortnight or so, firstly it was a lot of the old fabrics in the living room, which happened after my mother washed another families old clothes she had bought, which were strongly infused with the smell of generic washing powder, she put them on the kitchen radiators and there wasn't much but it seems that being exposed to that one day was enough to make me react to our stuff in the living room I was sleeping in that was completely unrelated. I was able to figure this out because I was feeling worse on one side of the living room than the other. My energy levels and exercise tolerance were still good then and I was able to re-arrange a lot of stuff. Other times problems happened after I went out and overdid things, got my bike totally stuck in the clay mud in a field one one occasion, I was already noticeably 'very tired' that morning. That might have been when I became reactive to the sofas I was sleeping on, or it was another time when I rode a long distance across very rough ground. I've basically stopped riding now though for a while I was doing it more on road.

With my normal chemical sensitivity pre-2022 the exposures would just make me feel more fatigued, confused, unsteady / disorientated, feverish, shaky in the muscles, and i'd want to get to fresher air before long, but it wasn't an extreme reaction, and it didn't suddenly spread from one chemical to another to the point where I would want to live in a glass house far from human civilisation or something. I've recognised that my MCS tends to spread to new things when I 'crash', which could take days to slowly build up, when this happens I start to get a sort of anxiety, a desire to retreat from people / sounds, sort of like over sensitivity to stimuli, my brain feels delicate.After the crash or MCS flare, I seem to feel very nostalgic or sad all of a sudden, unnaturally. I'll get nostalgic about silly things like something I was able to do a week or 2 before. Once I start to react to a new chemical / object like a TV, it seems to be stuck like that, I will always have some level of reaction to it, which might vary in nature, or intensity.

In jan I had a moderately cheap air purifier and it was fine for a few days ( Levoit pur-131 ) with active carbon VOC absorber, but this phenomenon happened and after that I could smell a 'noxious cocktail' from its vent, and I would get nausea everytime I turned it on, even from the other side of a large room.

 

[linusbert]

Once I start to react to a new chemical / object like a TV, it seems to be stuck like that, I will always have some level of reaction to it, which might vary in nature, or intensity.

i started also reacting to devices. not sure about my TV yet, but i got a hair dryer which triggers breathing difficulties... even for my inhalation device i actually bought to fight asthma, made it worse.
i got a LED panel , i am also reacting to that... this is maddening!!!
nobody understands this, all think you are crazy!

with active carbon VOC absorber, but this phenomenon happened and after that I could smell a 'noxious cocktail' from its vent, and I would get nausea everytime I turned it on, even from the other side of a large room.

ok, thats where i am a expert. do never buy any VOC filter, those usually are charcoal but the filters fill the air with a sweetish fume (which vanishes in seconds when you open a window), thats when the filter is fresh and good... when its not good anymore, it smells like road and parfum .. all the stuff it filtered out at once. sometimes you get a brand new device and its already smelling like that.

if you buy a air filter, buy one which only has a HEPA filter. but also then most use cheap materials... one device from philips also gave me the cough and asthma thing.
what i am using right now is a IQair pro health 250.
haha, mine has a charcoal filter like i said not to buy, but i feel its better in my device, though i often have the filter removed (can do that easy - but i still get the sweetish fume from the filter in the room). i am still experimenting as i am living on the road.
hepa does only particles like fine dust, but not fumes.

there are exceptions with VOC filters, dyson has a special aluminium(i believe) grid which attracts and smashes some formaldehyd in lesser harmful substances.
(i think the dyson also was well tolerated back then even with the voc filter. so for me dyson and iqair are the devices to go, but iqair is even better)

but in general, get a really good device, cheap is bad for health, like almost ever.
and if you still get a device with charcoal voc filter, make sure the VOC filter is BEFORE the HEPA. so the hepa filter must be the last layer where air gets through. so it filters fine dust from the charchoal filter.

here is how a iqair healthpro 250 and 150 is build up, you can easily remove any of those 3 filters, you got a prefilter bottom, the ventilaor, the black gas/voc filter and on top the hepa filter. you can just remove the gas filter and let it run without it, place it in back later as you wish.
also if you buy a 150 instead of 250 which is basically same device as 250 but without the voc filter. you can later buy a v5 cell voc filter for upgrade if someone wishes too.

 

[Howard]

Interesting. I began having reactions to artificial dyes after my second bout of Covid-19 (pneumonia / hospitalized, etc.). Assuming red-40, but remain unsure, so I practice avoidance.

H