You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Editorial
Delabelling penicillin allergy is not rocket science
  1. Paul Turner
  1. National Heart & Lung Institute, Imperial College London, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Paul Turner, National Heart & Lung Institute, Imperial College London, London W2 1PG, UK; p.turner{at}imperial.ac.uk

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2022-325200

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Up to 10% of children are labelled as ‘penicillin allergic’,1 in most cases before they even start school.2 However, following comprehensive allergy assessment, around 95% of penicillin allergy labels are found to be incorrect.3 Why this discordance? In children, the label may be applied following emergence of a viral exanthem (in those where symptoms were viral triggered), or due to non-allergic adverse events to the antibiotic which may be in part dependent on viral-antibiotic interactions (for instance, Ebstein-Barr infection and amoxicillin). In addition, sensitisation to penicillins wanes over …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors PT wrote the editorial.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Linked Articles

    • Original research
      Barriers to paediatric penicillin allergy de-labelling in UK secondary care: a regional survey
      Kene Maduemem Hannah Clark Iseult Sohal Tom Dawson Niten Makwana Paediatric Research Across the Midlands (PRAM) Network Anandi Singh Hannah Cooper Amanda Thompson Sieu Ha Amy Clarkson Hema Kannappan Poonam Kumar Laura Draper Ezgi Seager Emma Brazier Chibuko Ukeje Giedre Kayello
      Archives of Disease in Childhood 2022; 108 363-366 Published Online First: 19 Dec 2022. doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2022-324564
    • Highlights from this issue
      Atoms
      Nick Brown
      Archives of Disease in Childhood 2023; 108 i-i Published Online First: 19 Apr 2023. doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2023-325646