SAN JOSE, Calif. — Balloons, rubber bands, dishwashing gloves and yoga mats are hardly cause for panic for most people.
But to Patsy Hayes, even the slightest physical contact with latex is enough to send her to the hospital, wheezing with swollen lips, tongue and eyelids — a possibly life-threatening scenario.
Now, the severely allergic 21-year-old granddaughter of the late San Jose Mayor Janet Gray Hayes has a furry, 41-pound secret weapon trained to make sure she avoids her nemesis.
Introducing Andromeda, the latex detection dog.
The black Labrador retriever is part of a growing trend in service dogs primed to protect allergy sufferers from potentially deadly encounters with everything from soy to nuts.
“I know she’s got my back,” Hayes said of the playful but obedient pooch that returned with her in mid-January to college in upstate New York.
When Andromeda pinpoints any odor of latex, she drastically increases sniffing, brackets the source of the latex with her body, then sits and stares at the item to alert Hayes to stay away. Her owner rewards the dog’s efforts with lavish praise, a big hug and a delicious treat.
With an estimated 50 million Americans suffering from some type of allergy — including three million from latex, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — Hayes is not unique.
High cost
San Diego mother Trish Malone, who shares a severe latex allergy with her 11-year-old daughter, traveled to Colorado last month to pick up a Yellow Labrador trained to do the same thing. For $9,000, Nani — named after a character in the Disney movie “Lilo & Stitch” — will be a 24/7 nose guard for her daughter, who is so sensitive to latex that even contact with a pencil eraser requires a trip to the nurse’s office for her swollen throat.
“Latex allergy is very common,” said Malone, a 41-year-old CFO at a startup. “But to get a dog — it’s only a handful of people, because of the cost.”
Patsy Hayes found Allergen Detection Service Dogs, owned and operated by Ciara Gavin in Colorado Springs, after months of painstaking online research.
Still, teaching a dog to detect latex — a milky fluid produced by rubber trees that is processed into a variety of products, such as gloves and balloons — was a first for Gavin and her 7-year-old company.
Leaving home again
Years of training dogs to detect explosives and narcotics for the U.S. military and law enforcement agencies led Gavin to branch out in 2009 and focus on teaching dogs to detect an array of compounds — including nuts, milk, wheat, eggs and soy — that create serious allergic reactions in her clients.
Some of the afflicted, she said, rarely left their homes, didn’t go to school or movies, parks or churches — or even visit friends — out of fear of an allergy attack.
“But after getting a dog,” Gavin said, “they would start going places.”
Anaphylaxis is a sudden, life-threatening allergic reaction, often triggered by medications, food and insect stings. A recent study by the Allergy and Asthma Foundation of America showed that anaphylaxis occurs in at least 1 in 50 adults; experts say it’s probably closer to 1 in 20. For many, it can be brought on just by touching trace amounts of a substance like latex, peanuts, milk or eggs.
Lindy Hayes detected her daughter’s allergy 16 years ago following ear surgery done by a doctor wearing latex gloves. At home later on, the 5-year-old’s face began swelling up, and she was having trouble breathing.
Since then, Patsy Hayes’ latex-related incidents have only increased — landing her in hospital emergency rooms nine times over a 14-month period in 2015 and 2016.
“That’s when I said to her, ‘Do you really want to live like this?’ ” Lindy Hayes recalled.
Allergic reactions to latex typically show up in one of two ways: One is a delayed poison ivy-like rash that appears 12-36 hours after contact with a latex product, often on the hands of people in health care-related fields who wear latex gloves. While irritating, it’s not life-threatening.
The second is a more immediate and serious reaction of itching, redness, swelling, sneezing, possibly wheezing — and, in rare cases, anaphylactic shock, which can be fatal if not treated immediately.
Hayes suffers from an odd hybrid of the two: Her latex allergy can take four to eight hours to erupt, and when it does, she’s in trouble. She’s learned to fight back — on her way to the hospital — with the help of an EpiPen or a steroid.
But that still wasn’t enough for the Rochester University of Technology student, who is majoring in chemical engineering. For the rest of her life, she will have to be wary whenever she bumps up against, or breathes near, an object made with latex. Knowing that dogs could be trained to detect peanuts, she wondered: Why not latex? That’s when she contacted Gavin.
The service isn’t cheap. Gavin’s company charges $12,500 for the year it takes to train an allergen-detecting dog — and with their sturdy hips, Labs like Andromeda should be able to work as service dogs for at least 10 years, she said. Gavin also charges $2,500 for the two weeks needed to train an owner, and about $2,000 for travel expenses.
Lindy Hayes agreed to foot half the bill if her daughter came up with the balance, which Patsy Hayes is doing through a GoFundMe account and by tutoring students.
For the energetic Andromeda, detection hardly looks like drudgery.
Every compound has a unique smell, Gavin said, and once a dog associates that smell with a reward — praise, petting and that delicious snack — he or she will begin to hunt for the scent.
“They just want to please people,” said Gavin.
Lindy Hayes is thrilled with the progress her daughter has made with Andromeda — and the pair’s bonding is continuing in Rochester, where Patsy is fulfilling her final college internship.
Finally, Lindy Hayes has some peace of mind.
“For me as a mother, having to get that phone call saying, ‘I’m on my way to the hospital’ is upsetting,” Hayes said. “She is 3,000 miles away, and there is nothing I can do to help. But now she’s got an extra level of protection.”
