Britain's allergy epidemic could be tackled with immunotherapy, a controversial treatment largely abandoned in the 1980s when it led to the death of a number of patients.

The widespread use of the treatment, which involves injections of an allergen such as wasp venom or pollen, is to be recommended this week by a House of Lords committee.

The report will warn that Britain is in the throes of an allergy epidemic, with about 30% of the population affected. The prevalence of peanut allergy has trebled since 1996 from 0.6% to 1.8%. About 15% of children suffer from eczema.

Immunotherapy, or desensitisation, was discredited in the 1980s when an article in the British Medical Journal blamed it for the death of patients from anaphylactic shock.

Research has also shown that while immunotherapy can cure some allergies it can trigger others. Some patients cured of their pollen allergy after receiving the injections later became allergic to apples.

Despite this, the Lords’ science and technology committee will say it is the most promising treatment for many sufferers.

The committee is expected to say there is a dire shortage of doctors suitably qualified to treat the increasing number of sufferers. It will call for specialist allergy centres, run by doctors trained in the discipline, to be set up in every major hospital in Britain. It is also expected to call for GPs to receive better training in treating allergies.

During the inquiry the Lords heard that the average asthma sufferer has to make seven trips to the doctor before their condition is diagnosed.

The report is likely to say that Britain is lagging behind other European countries in allergy treatment, particularly because of the reluctance of many hospitals to offer immunotherapy.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency recommends that immunotherapy is restricted to patients who fail to respond to other allergy treatments. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has never carried out an appraisal of the desensitisation injections.

Immunotherapy involves the repeated injections of allergen extracts of house dust mites, pollen or wasp or bee venom to allergy sufferers to build up their tolerance.

Doctors insist the treatment, which used to be given in GP surgeries, is now safe if administered in hospitals by specialists, and there is evidence that it is highly effective for asthma.

Unlike inhalers and nasal sprays, it may give long term remission to sufferers.

Dr Glenis Scadding, a consultant allergist at the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear hospital in central London, said: “Immunotherapy is the only hope of curing (allergies) at the moment. Powerful steroids are pretty effective but they do not cure the disease.”

Scadding said she thought immunotherapy should be used much earlier as a treatment. “At the moment it is reserved for patients failing pharmacology,” she said. “In Europe there is a study looking at children with rhinitis (which causes sneezing) treated by immunotherapy and now, after 10 years, they are 2.5 times less likely to have asthma than a group of children of a similar age treated with drugs. The progression from rhinitis to asthma can be almost completely halted by immunotherapy.”

The Lords committee is also likely to warn that many self-test kits to diagnose food intolerances are unreliable and lead patients to give up foodstuffs unnecessarily.

The committee is expected to warn that current government advice to pregnant women and young children to avoid eating peanuts could put them at greater risk of allergic reaction.

Government advice, issued in 1998, recommends that women should avoid eating peanuts while they are pregnant if they or the baby’s father or one of their previous children has eczema, asthma, hay fever or other allergic responses to food.

The committee is likely to recommend this advice is immediately withdrawn.

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