About 4 percent of Americans suffer from a food allergy. And between emergency room and doctor visits and lost wages, food allergies cost the U.S. economy half a billion dollars each year, a new study finds.
Surprisingly, doctor visits made up more than half, 52 percent of the total food allergy spending. That cost also includes routine management of food allergies.
According to Maria Acebal, the vice president of research at the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, an organization that helped fund the research, the study is a good step toward quantifying the enormity of the food allergy problem in the U.S. There has been an inexplicable explosion of childhood food allergies. Between 1997 and 2007 the rate of food allergies in children grew by 18 percent.
