reaction to 3 totally different foods

[peedee]

In the last 18 months I have had a severe itchy reaction to 3 different foods.
My lips tingle and I itch so bad I have to use cold water to relieve it, even inside my ears, and a rash covers all my body except my face.
It lasts about 1 hour.
The 3 foods are
A chocolate bar which I think was a Wisper,a dream or a Secret bar
A Robinson's all natural fruit drop
A cold buffet at a party where I didn't even have time to try anything sweet before the reaction happened.
The reactions have all been exactly the same and have not got better or worse.

[Dr Adam Fox]

why not start by getting the ingredient lists of all 3 and seeing if there is anything in common. What you describe does sound suspicious of a food allergy and you should ask your doctor to investigate this

[peedee]

With the fruit drop i'd eaten all the red and orange ones, it was a yellow one which caused the problem.
The only ingredient which wasn't natural or that I'd never heard of was spirulina concentrate which I think is some kind of algae, but I would have thought it was in all the flavours.
At the buffet I had salad ,quiche, ham, salmon and eggs.
I'm not sure what the chocolate bar was but I can't find any of the names I thought it was to check.

[Dr Helen Brough]

Dear Peedee,

Difficult to say what the linking factor is; there may have been contamination of the salad buffet with some thing you are allergic to. Regarding the sweet , there are reports of allergy to artificial colouring azo-dyes such as Tartrazine (E102) and Sunset yellow (E110) but these are very rare. The doctor you see would need to go through a thorough history to check for possible foods known to allergenic or other factors that could have caused these reactions. It would be useful to take the sweet and ingredients to the clinic appointment as they can do modified skin prick testing to the sweet itself.

Kind regards,

Dr Helen Brough