Allerca's hypoallergenic cats and the mystery disease
Monday I posted about Allerca, a company selling hypoallergenic cats. I linked to an article that said Allerca puts prospective buyers through a battery of allergy tests, to be sure the problem really is a cat allergy. This is understandable, since too many customers saying your $4000 product "didn't work" isn't good for sales.
If the testing was easy and cheap I'd do it out of curiosity. My pseudo-allergies (to cats, mold, a few other allergens and sometimes nothing at all) were somewhat unusual. For instance high-carb meals made my nose stuffy, and there were clear connections to my exercise-induced asthma.
Over time I stumbled on treatments that "cured" my pseudo-allergies and suggested they were caused less by allergens than my body's overall inflammation level and TH1/TH2 balance. Those factors point to things like cortisol, EFAs and vitamin D, and from there we get back to the "mystery disease". I am allergic to cats, but my reaction varies widely depending on the factors above. The worst case (10+ years ago) had my eyes watering and nose running so badly I couldn't see or stop blowing my nose until I found an effective treatment (I used way too much NAC).
These days I rarely have problems without intense exposure, e.g. getting cat allergens in my eyes. (The Cats likes to head-butt my hands while I sleep, and apparently I like to rub my eyes... DOH!) When I do have reactions now they're pretty mild due to the nutritional treatments I mentioned.
I never knew anyone who shared my pseudo-allergies so I always thought they were uncommon, but now it's clear that similar root causes can manifest differently in each person. There seem to be a lot of people with some version of the mystery disease, so now I wonder if the root causes of my condition are more common than I thought. This seems especially relevant not just because the mystery disease seems to be widespread, but also because excessive inflammation is slowly being recognized as an important factor in some diseases, especially long-term degenerative conditions. (Excessive inflammation without overt symptoms could be considered a subclinical version of the mystery disease, though anything that speeds degenerative diseases along is hardly unimportant in my universe.)
Getting back to the cats, the article I linked to said Allerca gene-screened many cats to see if they had normal/allergenic gene or the mutant/hypoallergenic variant. This made me think it'd be nice if Allerca sold allergen-gene tests to animal shelters so they could estimate how a prospective adopter might react to a given cat. (Tech nitpick: If a cat has the allergenic gene you'd want a further test, to see how much allergen the cat actually makes. This should give a better idea of how allergenic the cat will be.) In retrospect I don't think we can be sure just yet if that'd be a good or bad thing.
Selling gene tests could help shelters arrange more and more compatible adoptions, clearly a good thing. It could also backfire, for instance cats that tested as 'more allergenic' might get passed over without a second glance.
I doubt Allerca would sell those tests, though. They've said their cats are selectively bred and that the desired gene is dominant. Knowing this other breeders could easily use the tests to duplicate Allerca's work and compete with them. Even without the test breeders might find less-allergenic cats, using existing tests or groups of allergic people, and focus on breeding them. This would probably lure people away from adopting a rescued cat and towards buying from a breeder, which isn't what I'd like to see happen. In this case just the information Allerca has discovered and made public could be enough to change how breeders work, in a way I'd consider undesirable.
Another question is how selective breeding would affect the cats. If the gene is dominant, why is it so rare? Does it carry some serious liability along with it? Maybe causing allergies actually benefits the cat, or used to in the past.
Obviously most of this is speculation, but that's the point: We don't know how things would turn out if Allerca got into the testing market. The outcome would depend greatly on a number of as yet unknown details, and that makes it very hard to predict. Given the different ways things could work out I'm not at all sure I'd want Allerca to sell the tests, even if they were likely to do so.
If the testing was easy and cheap I'd do it out of curiosity. My pseudo-allergies (to cats, mold, a few other allergens and sometimes nothing at all) were somewhat unusual. For instance high-carb meals made my nose stuffy, and there were clear connections to my exercise-induced asthma.
Over time I stumbled on treatments that "cured" my pseudo-allergies and suggested they were caused less by allergens than my body's overall inflammation level and TH1/TH2 balance. Those factors point to things like cortisol, EFAs and vitamin D, and from there we get back to the "mystery disease". I am allergic to cats, but my reaction varies widely depending on the factors above. The worst case (10+ years ago) had my eyes watering and nose running so badly I couldn't see or stop blowing my nose until I found an effective treatment (I used way too much NAC).
These days I rarely have problems without intense exposure, e.g. getting cat allergens in my eyes. (The Cats likes to head-butt my hands while I sleep, and apparently I like to rub my eyes... DOH!) When I do have reactions now they're pretty mild due to the nutritional treatments I mentioned.
I never knew anyone who shared my pseudo-allergies so I always thought they were uncommon, but now it's clear that similar root causes can manifest differently in each person. There seem to be a lot of people with some version of the mystery disease, so now I wonder if the root causes of my condition are more common than I thought. This seems especially relevant not just because the mystery disease seems to be widespread, but also because excessive inflammation is slowly being recognized as an important factor in some diseases, especially long-term degenerative conditions. (Excessive inflammation without overt symptoms could be considered a subclinical version of the mystery disease, though anything that speeds degenerative diseases along is hardly unimportant in my universe.)
Getting back to the cats, the article I linked to said Allerca gene-screened many cats to see if they had normal/allergenic gene or the mutant/hypoallergenic variant. This made me think it'd be nice if Allerca sold allergen-gene tests to animal shelters so they could estimate how a prospective adopter might react to a given cat. (Tech nitpick: If a cat has the allergenic gene you'd want a further test, to see how much allergen the cat actually makes. This should give a better idea of how allergenic the cat will be.) In retrospect I don't think we can be sure just yet if that'd be a good or bad thing.
Selling gene tests could help shelters arrange more and more compatible adoptions, clearly a good thing. It could also backfire, for instance cats that tested as 'more allergenic' might get passed over without a second glance.
I doubt Allerca would sell those tests, though. They've said their cats are selectively bred and that the desired gene is dominant. Knowing this other breeders could easily use the tests to duplicate Allerca's work and compete with them. Even without the test breeders might find less-allergenic cats, using existing tests or groups of allergic people, and focus on breeding them. This would probably lure people away from adopting a rescued cat and towards buying from a breeder, which isn't what I'd like to see happen. In this case just the information Allerca has discovered and made public could be enough to change how breeders work, in a way I'd consider undesirable.
Another question is how selective breeding would affect the cats. If the gene is dominant, why is it so rare? Does it carry some serious liability along with it? Maybe causing allergies actually benefits the cat, or used to in the past.
Obviously most of this is speculation, but that's the point: We don't know how things would turn out if Allerca got into the testing market. The outcome would depend greatly on a number of as yet unknown details, and that makes it very hard to predict. Given the different ways things could work out I'm not at all sure I'd want Allerca to sell the tests, even if they were likely to do so.