The Causes of Hives in Infants
It is not uncommon to encounter hives in infants. Developing immune systems are particularly sensitive to any sort of alien element and hives is a common response to a whole series of foods and conditions. For the most part, hives are not an indication of something serious.
Warning: Although hives by themselves are not something that you should panic about, you do want to pay attention to any accompanying symptoms. If your baby shows difficulty breathing shortly after you notice hives, you should immediately call your physician or 911. Similarly, you should treat loss of consciousness, swelling of the tongue or throat as an emergency, and immediately get help. Of course, even without hives present these serious conditions suggest your baby may be going into anaphylactic shock as a result of an allergic reaction.
Identifying Hives
Hives present as a skin condition. Typically, the child will have a raised pale area with a reddish border. This may last for a period of minutes or hours before fading. However, one of the main identifiers of hives is that just when they disappear on one region of the body, they will pop up on another region. This iterant quality to hives is one indication that they are immune related rather than topically contained on the skin surface.
Causes of Hives in Infants
Hives are most commonly an allergic reaction to certain kinds of food. Most often, they are a reaction to the proteins in milk, although tomatoes and shellfish are also a common source of hives. As you probably know, you should not feed peanuts or any other kinds of nuts to your infant—especially if your family has a history of peanut allergies. This is because some infants have been known to have particularly severe reactions to peanuts (fatalities to peanut allergies are not completely unheard of).
Another thing to remember is that your infant does not need to ingest these allergens directly. If you are breast-feeding and you have eaten any of these foods beforehand, you could sneak the allergen into your infant’s system through your breast milk. This is why it is a good reason to avoid these foods yourself during the months you are breast-feeding. Be especially careful because many foods might not seem to have peanuts, but actually do. Be sure to check the label for the ingredients.
For the reason stated above, peanuts are a special danger for parents. In the United Kingdom, manufacturers are not only required to state when peanuts are one of the official ingredients of their products but to state whether the facility where the product originates also produces peanut products. This requirement is due to incidents of cross contamination where traces of peanuts have ended up in products that did not officially have peanuts as an ingredient. The United States does not yet have such a law, but legislation may soon change that—so you should keep an eye out for them.
Allergies to food may also result from topical exposure. If your child is drinking apple juice and dribbles some on her chest, she may later develop hives or an allergic reaction at that location. This may occur even if your infant does not seem to have a systemic reaction to that ingredient (i.e., the infant does not break into hives when he or she swallows the same food that causes the skin reaction). Typically, however, such topical reactions will not disappear and appear somewhere else.
Finally, don’t forget that some infants may have an allergic reaction to cat dander or as a side effect to certain medications. Hives in infants can also be caused by changes in temperatures (such as after a bath or on a particularly hot or cold day) so be aware of this as well.
If your infant gets hives, pay careful attention to the conditions just before your infant breaks out and then consult your physician. Under certain condition where hives are combined with fever, your physician may recommend taking an infant safe antihistamine, but you do not want to take this upon yourself. Be sure to consult your infant’s pediatrician as such medicines can have severe consequences if poorly administered.