Donate to Help Fund Life Saving Allergy Treatment in USA

Hi! Welcome to our page.

We’re Katie and Neil, parents of Yann (8), who lives with 12 life threatening food allergies.

Being severely allergic means having to avoid coming into contact with trace amounts of food allergens, being on alert constantly, having limited social opportunities & carrying emergency adrenaline & asthma meds everywhere at all times.

Yann is severely allergic to the following foods which are present pretty much everywhere in the UK food environment:

Milk (inc butter, cheese, yoghurt, cream, ice-cream etc)

Egg

Peanut

Treenuts

Seafood

Sesame

Coconut

Wheat (bread, pasta, pastries, cakes, biscuits etc)

Kiwi

Pulses (beans, peas, soya)

Nutmeg

Lupin (contained in baked products)

If Yann ingests or inhales the smallest amount of any of his allergens, he risks going into anaphylactic shock which could be fatal.

Trying to avoid the tiniest tracé amount of these foods and therefore anaphylaxis, is incredibly difficult (check the ingredients of any food that you buy & see how many of them ‘contain’ or ‘may contain’ these allergens) especially in social situations. This means that high school and many job opportunities as well as sleepovers and trips to a restaurant / eating takeaway are completely out of the question for him. As children with severe allergies get older and more independent, the risks increase. The highest number of fatalities occur between the ages of 15-25.

Yann’s condition is classed a severe and complex. Having explored & now exhausted all potential treatment options within the UK & Europe, we have secured a place for Yann to start tailor made treatment at the Food Allergy Institute (FAI) in California.

The FAI delivers a Tolerance Induction Programme which has successfully put over 8,000 children with severe and complex food allergies into complete remission, free from all food restrictions. They call it achieving Food Freedom.

Those who have undergone the treatment go from living in fear every single day and missing out on many social activities & opportunities, to living life in the full, without restriction or danger.

This treatment will completely change Yann’s life for the better. However it is not cheap and it will not be easy.

We will have to travel to and from California from the UK every 12 weeks for the foreseeable future. In between visits we will need to ‘dose him’ with many different levels of different food proteins as his body slowly starts to adjust and continually monitor for signs of impending reactions. We currently anticipate that the treatment will take a minimum of 5 years but this could increase or decrease depending on how his body responds.

*The anticipated cost of treatment is £20,000 per year plus travel and accommodation.*

All funds raised will contribute towards the treatment itself.

We will keep you updated as our journey progresses!

Our long term aim is to create a fund which can support other children like Yann accessing this life changing treatment. More on that to follow as it evolves!

Thank you for your support.