Establishment of Functionality Evaluation System for Anti-Allergy of Health Functional Food

The term allergy was originally defined by Clemens Yon Pirquet as ‘an altered capacity of the body to react to foreign substance’, which was an extremely board definition that included all immunological reactions. Allergy is now defined in a much more restricted manner as ‘disease following an immune response to an otherwise innocuous antigen’. Allergy is a member of a class of immune responses that have been termed hypersensitivity reactions; these are harmful immune responses that produce tissue injury and may cause serious disease. (omitted)