Not what causes it, but why they have the illness.
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So basically, when your body is infiltrated with something that it feels should not be there, it launches a “counterattack” to fight off the intruders.
Sometimes, our body is mistaken, and it launches this counterattack on something that is not dangerous to our bodies at all, such as strawberries, nuts, or beestings. This is called an allergy. Allergies range from a simple swelling to what we call anaphylactic shock.
Now, you can not be born with an allergy. To become allergic to something, you first have to had come in contact with it at least once. Let’s say a bee stings you for the first time. Your body will sense the bee’s poison and start making proteins to counteract this poison, so called “antibodies”. After the bee sting has passed, these antibodies will remain in our circulation so that the next time you get stung, your body is able to react very quickly.
In some individuals, these antibodies can react so violently, through certain types of white blood cells called Mast Cells, that they cause a release of a hormone called histamine. When this reaction is so violent that the histamine enters the bloodstream and this ends up everywhere, this can cause the body to go into overdrive, because it thinks that it’s being attacked very violently, and so it will launch it’s own counterattack of immense proportions. This is what we call “anaphylactic shock”.
Why some people are more prone to being severely allergic than other individuals is a tricky question. Predisposing factors can be time of first contact with the specimen, genetic factors, mast cell count, or general immune overactivity. There’s not something one can point to and say: “that’s why!”
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