[X] My Assistant

[Stahlseele]

[Kyoto Kid]

...yeah the Short One (#85) has an allergy to meat (uncommon/moderate). The GM considered of setting part of a run take place in a packing plant and having the workers use those air bazookas (like they use at basketball games for shooting T-shirts into the stands) to launch raw meatballs at her. That would have been real baaaaaad. :grinbig:

[Stahlseele]

uhm . . if it is FOOD allergy against meat it only counts if INGESTED . . if it is GENERAL ALLERGY . . she'd be allergic to her own Body-MEAT O.o;,

[CircuitBoyBlue]

No, food allergies suck if you touch the substance. They suck bigtime. If the Short One was as allergic to meat as I was to peanuts, then a meatball to the neck or face could very well kill him(though slowly), and a meatball anywhere on exposed skill would be enough to distract him heavily.

[Kyoto Kid]

...CBB is correct. I have read of such cases when I proofed Medical Journal text while working at a company that built indexed libraries on CD.

At one point when we were on a stakeout one of the team members went on a food run forgetting about the Short One's allergy. When she opened the bag she was given and got a whiff of the half pound BigMick, the GM assigned her a -2 penalty for the rest of the (in game) night.

I have developed a mild sensitivity ("5 BP" version) to eggs. In baked goods it is not so much an issue, but eggs by themselves or "real" mayo, and I'm done for the rest of the day pretty much. Damn I miss French Toast smothered in real maple syrup. :grinbig:

[Stahlseele]

hu? @.@
i figured out what my buddy is allergic to . . certain types of meat, incidentally . . but he can touch and work it just fine . . only problem arises if he eats any of that stuff . . he basically keels over the next toilet and plays dead for one or two days . . but as long as it does not actually enter his body he is perfectly fine being dumped into(don't ask) or having been pelted by(seriously . . DON'T ASK!) the stuff . .

[Kyoto Kid]

...what we are dealing with here is the degree and type of sensitivity. KK's is pretty severe in that even the smell of it cooking causes her to become slightly nauseated. Fortunately in 2070, meat is not all that commonplace though flavourings and byproduct additives can still be enough to trigger a reaction in some people.

Also if you touch the substance and later put your hands to your face forgetting (as the Short One is capable of with her Logic rating), you can still ingest enough given the severity of the allergy to cause a reaction.

[CircuitBoyBlue]

Like I said, I can personally vouch for reacitons being caused by contact. Without getting into specifics, I've had a date go horribly, horribly wrong.

Also, another accidental exposure I've had problems with is when someone told me to eat some awful thing called a "Chico stick" when I was about 7. It was orange, but so processed that you couldn't really tell by texture or smell that it had peanuts in it. But an allergic tongue is a pretty great chemical detector, and immediately after biting off a mouthful, I realized what had happened and started spitting it all out. Unfortunately, in my panicked haste, I was spitting it all over myself. Luckily, since I was only 7 at the time, I can look back on this with more amusement than I or my mother had at the time, but wherever my spittle landed immediately broke out into a bright orange, blistering rash. I also vaguely recall some other stupid little kid touching me with peanut buttery hands in daycare, and me having a handprint rash. Cool stuff, if you have good recall but terrible emotional memory.

[Feshy]

[Fortune]

[Stahlseele]

what the heck? O.o
i seem to have been leading a sheltered life in the nimbus of intelligence then . . 'cause people in all places i was made to go at least ONCE asked me of ANY allergies . .

[Fortune]

Maybe your age has something to do with it. 35 or 40 years ago when I was going to school things were quite a bit different. ;)

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, blaming it on America is pretty lame. You do have to remember that a lot of kids like to exagerrate and will happily try saying that they are allergic if they think it might get them out of eating something they don't like. My sister used to try it all the time. No idea why she thought it'd work, but that's 7 year olds for you. While it's certainly presumptuous and potentially dangerous to assume kids are merely always being manipulative on this subject, it isn't exactly like the notion comes flying out of a vacuum either.

[Mongoose]

[Stahlseele]

as for fluff reasons you'd be pretty much spot on with that . .
fluff says HUGE parts of the general populace are analphabets and get by using pictograms and voice input and things like that . . such people would not know how to do most things without such technology available O.o

[Moon-Hawk]

[Moya]

What are allergies? An allergy is an abnormal reaction by a person's immune system against a normally harmless substance. A person without allergies would have no reaction to this substance, but when a person who is allergic encounters the trigger, the body reacts by releasing chemicals which cause allergy symptoms.

It is unknown why some people develop allergies and some don’t. Allergies seem to run in families, and in some cases family members can share allergies to specific foods or medications. It appears that the allergic response was once meant to protect the body against parasitic infections, although now seems to be an abnormal response to non-infectious triggers. Allergies can occur at any time during our lives, but are more common to occur during childhood or young adulthood. 40% of us have some sort of allergy.

What can cause you to get an allergic reaction? There are 4 different methods of exposure. Some allergens manifest in only one or a few of these methods but they generally they are categorized by method of exposure. There are Contact (touching), Inhalation (breathing), Ingestion (eating) and Injection (bee sting).

What do allergies do? Rash, itchy/watery eyes, nasal and chest congestion are the most common and mild symptoms of an allergic reaction. Severe itch and difficulty breathing are more severe. In extreme cases victims suffer from anaphylaxis or anaphylactic shock. Varying degrees of swelling that can make breathing and swallowing difficult or impossible abdominal pain, cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, mental confusion or dizziness can all be symptoms of anaphylaxis and can be disabling.

What can we be allergic to? Just about anything is capable of causing your antibodies to go on overkill. The most common contact and inhalation allergens are, pet dander and pollen. Injected allergens usually take the form of insect bites and some vaccines that may carry proteins that cause allergies. Food allergies are also very common and are usually associated with peanuts and other nuts, seafood (such as shrimp), milk (particularly cow's milk), eggs, soy and wheat. It is extremely rare to be allergic to metals, plastics or other such substances.

In the awakened world you have several new kinds of artificial and magical materials in the atmosphere. Not to mention the aftermath of volcanoes and whatever other mixture of natural disaster/pollution our new governments and megacorps may be responsible for. Exposure to various chemicals would be constant. Most of our foodstuffs are pretty uniformally made of the same base proteins (proteins are the most common sources of allergies).

Cybertechnology might also form some new problems as drugs need to be created to make the body accept these foreign objects in the body. These drugs would go a long way to alter and weaken immune systems in order to allow for the intrusion of cybertech.

Changes in our immune systems may have also been caused by the several VITAS plagues. Constant exposure to irritants would wreak havoc on metahuman immune systems and most likely cause a wide variety of allergies and other medical conditions. Those who are learned in the metabiology know that certain awakened creatures have special allergic sensitivities. For example, werecreatures are known to have a strong allergic reaction to silver. Those infected with vampirism have sensitivity to sunlight.

Allergies are not a trivial thing. They have a constant effect on peoples lives and can be possibly life threatening. They should be treated as such. Nobody should ever be “better off� for being allergic to something.

[Cthulhudreams]

[Nikoli]

Yeah, i found out the hard way I have a food allergy to raw tomoato (either the juice or the pulp, no real desire to ascertain which). Injestion pretty much plants me on a toilet for a few hours. Contact with the stuff raises welts, though if I have a ready source of water (such as during resturant style food prep) I'm roughly okay. Though the day I accidentally ran my hand into the tomato slicer blades after I had just finished prepping a few dozen pretty much finished me for the day.

Funny thing is, I love ketchup and marinarra and arrabiata sauces. something about cooking the stuff renders it harmless.

[Karaden]

[CircuitBoyBlue]

Ok, I promise I don't live in a bubble or anything. But another of my many allergies is to eggs (it's nowhere near as bad as the peanut allergy). I'm not allergic to eggs all the time. I can't figure it out: I can have them baked into stuff, which I can see making sense because that way they're cooked. But I can't have scrambled eggs, which are also cooked (I mean, it would be a lame powergaming allergy if I were only allergic to raw eggs, I guess). So I don't know what the difference is between the egg being baked, and the egg being fried, or hard-boiled, or any of the other ways that people eat eggs for breakfast. Also, I can definitely have pasteurized eggnog, if anyone's stupid enough to let me get near it.

[Kyoto Kid]

...I know, it's weird that the baked stuff doesn't bother me either. However give me, a couple eggs over easy, an omelet, or slather a sandwich with Mayo and pow, I'm down for the count. :mr yuk:

[Karaden]

Now your really getting into it with how exactly stuff is cooked, which can once again change how it is structured, which is why food tastes different if it is cooked in a frying pan, oven, BBQ, or some other strange way. When eggs are cooked in the fry pan (ala scrabled) they form a different structure then in the oven, especially when mixed with other ingrediants.

[kzt]

http://www.boston.com/news/science/article...s_a_revolution/

[Nikoli]

It's not just things like that either. Psoriassis is like that as well. There is no known familiy history of it in my family, but I have a real bad case, very resistent to therepy. So far the only thing my skin reacts favorably to is UV radiation, everything else just helps with the ferver aspects of it. My mom asked me how I could have a genetic disorder with no family history. I explained that as hygeine went up, things like this became discovered. Likely many folks in the family had it, but as most of my ancestors on either side had farm jobs, train jobs, and all around messy jobs by today's standards, I have spent my life mostly in doors, at a computer, in a library, in an office building.