Antihistamine medication should be included on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to help combat a “tsunami of allergic diseases”, a national allergy summit in Sydney has recommended.
The summit was told that many parents go without the expensive medications to ensure that their children are adequately treated.
The president of the Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy, Dr Richard Loh, said for many families the cost of treating allergic disease is prohibitive.
“Patients are being denied any subsidised medications to manage their allergic disease, and the costs to patients and their families are significant.”
Dr Loh, a leading allergy specialist and immunology physician, said that often patients have more than one allergic disease and the costs of treating multiple illnesses can add up.
“[For] a patient with allergic rhinitis or hay fever, the cost of an antihistamine would be about $30 a month.
“If they’ve got steroids, intranasal steroids, that’s again $30 a month. If they’ve got conjunctivitis – allergic, itchy eyes – often the medications will add up to about $30 a month.
“If they’ve got eczema, which many of them will, by the time they add the cost of steroid medications, moisturisers, bath oils, it’s easily $30 a month.”
Allergic diseases are hereditary and often multiple family members will require treatment, where the cost of medication adds up even further.
“If you’ve got two or three children in the family, and often one or both parents have allergic diseases, the costs can be easily $400, $500 a month,” Dr Loh said.
“For many families that is prohibitive and parents deny themselves the medication and then they have to balance using cheaper alternatives which are less efficacious.”
The outcome for patients who are not adequately medicated can be significant, Dr Loh said.
“[In children] poor control of these symptoms [can mean] poor exam grades – if you’ve got bad allergic rhinitis during exam time, you don’t do as well.
“If you’re an adult, there’s a term called “presenteeism” where you go to work, but you’ve really had very poor sleep; you feel congested; you feel as though you’ve got a bad cold.
“So productivity by the individual and the cost to the company that employs the individual is significant.”
‘Tsunami of allergic diseases’ highlights need for education
In recent years medical professionals have described “a tsunami” of patients being diagnosed with allergic disease.
“It’s important that we up-skill health professionals, including GPs, dieticians, nurses, to have the skills to help manage this tsunami of allergic diseases,” Dr Loh said.
“During the meeting we heard from patients that, in some regions, it takes up to two years to see an allergy specialist. That’s unacceptable.”
Dr Loh has said there is a need for community education on the breadth of effective treatments available for allergic disease.
“A lot of patients don’t realise that there are good treatments for their allergic diseases, so they’re not even presenting to their doctor.
“They just accept the fact that they’ve got, you know, bad eczema or really bad allergic rhinitis because nothing can be done.
“There are good treatments available. We need to raise community awareness and we need to raise the knowledge of our other health professionals to help manage these conditions.”