Misuse more than 20 years ago of a powerful technique for treating allergies has led to Britain lagging far behind other countries.

Until the mid-1980s, some GPs routinely treated allergy sufferers with immunotherapy, a technique in which the allergen is identified and injected below the skin in small but increasing doses, to induce tolerance.

The practice was stopped in its tracks by a report from the Committee on the Safety of Medicines in 1986 that said immunotherapy had caused 26 deaths over the previous 30 years.

But the injections had been given to “the wrong patients by the wrong people in the wrong places”, Baroness Finlay of Llandaff said yesterday.

GP surgeries were the wrong place to give such injections because they were not equipped to deal with the fatal complications if the treatment caused anaphylactic shock, she said. But, given by specialists in a hospital setting, immunotherapy was safe and effective. In Germany and Denmark, the committee was told, Britain was regarded as very backward in failing to use it much more often.

Barry Kay of the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College, an adviser to the committee, said: “It’s a very effective form of treatment, proved by numerous trials. When it is given by experts in the correct surroundings, there are no deaths.”

Not all allergies can be treated by immunotherapy, but it is effective for hay fever, mild asthma and bee and wasp stings. Professor Kay said that it could not be used for food allergies or for eczema or dermatitis.

A handful of specialists provide the treatment in Britain but “there are huge waiting lists and the situation just isn’t satisfactory”. A long series of injections may be needed. The effects are variable, but on average it reduces the symptoms of hay fever by between 40 and 60 per cent.

Today a different and simpler form of immunotherapy is available, using tablets that dissolve under the tongue.

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