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ACDS CAMP
We have finished our updates on CAMP for 2012-2013! We believe that CAMP has been improved substantially during the past year and should now be even more complete and accurate!
CAMP already had produced the most accurate allergen searches available. However, since the turn of the year, we have been striving to make CAMP even more accurate. We identified several areas we could improve upon and asked the programmers to make a few upgrades to CAMP. All of these improvements related to improving CAMP’s ability to pick up as many potential cross-reacting ingredients as possible. We apologize for a couple of technical problems the past couple of weeks as these changes were made, however, these have now been solved and CAMP should be an even stronger tool than previously.
The following are the main changes which were made in 2012-2013;
1) The number of products in CAMP was greatly increased and there are now over 3600 products in the database! We have included more common products, more department store products and many new product categories. All product ingredient information was checked meticulously with the ingredients on the product labels.
2) When typing in uncommon allergens, CAMP will now highlight related allergens. We recommend including these related highlighted ingredients in most searches. For example, previously if you searched for aloe vera and did not manually highlight other aloe-related ingredients, CAMP would not search for aloe vera, aloe barbadensis, etc. With the upgrade, CAMP now highlights all aloe ingredients automatically so that these can be included in your search. If you wish to deliberately do a more narrow search, CAMP still allows you to de-highlight allergens you do not wish to search for.
3) A new function was added to allow us to add cross-reacting ingredients more quickly and efficiently. Using advice provided by the cross-reactor advisory group, we have added many additional cross-reactors to the existing cross-reactor groups and also have added many new cross-reactor groups.
4) We have added a new common allergen box which reads; Fragrance (standard)( include botanicals). In many cases, physicians will wish to avoid botanicals for patients allergic to fragrance. When this box is checked, CAMP will find products free of fragrance and free of botanicals.
Due to the more stringent cross-reactor definitions which are now being used, it is possible that some patients will find that their “safe” list will no longer contain certain products which were previously listed as “safe”. This should be offset by the fact that there are now 4 times as many products in the database!
After the ACDS meeting, we will begin the process of updating all of the products added this past year. All products in the database will be updated annually.
We hope you will find the updated CAMP database to be even more helpful in your practice!
Andrew Scheman, M.D.
Director; CAMP
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