Yeah. This isn't the stone age. We know for a fact what saliva is composed of. It's over 99% water. Then you've got enzymes, inorganic molecules, and the like in it.
I do find myself wondering if the intolerance is about pH, but I think there's zero chance that all those doctors and scientists didn't think of that. Plus, Diet Coke is quite acid, and both milk and saliva are almost neutral (as is, obviously, water), so there's no pattern there. (Apparently milk is barely acid, while saliva bobs around a bit.)
It would be interesting to see what experiments have been done, and what paths pursued. It's so rare, there probably hasn't been a ton of funding for it. Google Scholar gives some results, but most of the ones I saw are behind pay walls.
I also wonder if it's psychological. Is it possible to have immediate hives from a purely psychological source? Probably not.
I don't know. I saw something about a psychosomatic allergic reaction that took off after about 20 minutes. How about this, since we're hypothesizing. The external symptoms are caused by some compound--in the water, in the skin, or what have you. The throat closing after drinking is psychosomatic, from the anxiety or fear of drinking (conscious or subconscious) knowing that you have this condition where water causes horrible things to happen to your skin. An anxiety-related attack can cause the throat to feel like it is closing off very quickly.
So it's possible to get visible blisters from just thinking about it? They report getting blisters in their throat as well.
I don't know. That seems extreme. But in the case of the psychosomatic peanut allergy the woman did get hives on her skin, so who knows. Set aside the blisters in the throat--I'm just hypothesizing as to an interesting scenario, not what happened to that particular woman. I don't know--scientists who study this don't know.
Yeah, that seems as plausible as any of the explanations. I'm thinking over everything that might change about skin when it's wet. Skin conductance? Water evaporation?
I'd want to know if a doctor attested to those throat blisters. Those reports seem to all be from patients.
There's some fodder here for SF. I don't know if either of the above would account for the throat, but I like the ideas for epidermis. You might find this interesting: in the psychosomatic peanut allergy I mentioned, a woman would get hives and itching within about 20 minutes after eating peanuts, but she didn't test positive for a peanut allergy. The doctors ended up giving her two concoctions--one containing peanuts and one placebo. The peanuts could not be tasted in either one of them, so the patient didn't know which she was getting. The patient showed no reaction. Then the cool part--after being told she had ingested peanuts in the experiment, with no reaction to them, the patient no longer had a reaction to eating peanuts.
Oh, that's interesting. Even before you said this, I was briefly wondering if anyone had ever tried making these people damp in some way that prevented them from being aware that they were damp. I was distracted by the difficulty in finding a way to do that. Ooh. But the opposite might not be too hard--often coolness feels like wetness.
That would be an interesting experiment to try. If they reacted, then you'd know it was psychosomatic.
Not to get political, but... I feel like this is the same phenomenon we see with some Trump supporters. If the facts get in the way of what you want, question the facts, rather than what you want. It's intriguing. I'm watching this thread, for sure!
Shelf life of a year (18 months) means someone could have a collection of expired pens. I'm with everyone else on this one, a picture of someone with a lot of epi-pens isn't evidence of anything. Epi is a hormone but it is not a steroid. Asthmatics have steroid inhalers to decrease inflammation in the airway. They also use what are called 'rescue inhalers' like albuterol, a bronchodilator, also not a steroid. As far as I know you don't build up a tolerance to epi, or if you do, it's not something that is likely to happen to a person. You wouldn't want to be using your epi-pen very often. The reason for seeing the doctor if attacks increase is because other meds or med schedules might need to be changed.
In the movie Signs, the aliens were killed by water. IMDb movie review. So is the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz, she melts.
I was just thinking about that movie! If I recall correctly. M. Night got a some of flak about having aliens invade a planet that's 70% made of something they're allergic to.
I don't remember details of the film, but if I was going to write it that way I'd have the reason they came to earth be so important that it justified the enormous risk.
You should use search engines, I just had to put in 'saliva water' into Google and the first thing out of the gate (Science Daily) stated that saliva is 98% water. It's got a higher water content than a jellyfish. When I read the article, all I could think of is my issue with onions, I'm not allergic to them, but I find them so revolting my gag reflex kicks in and I cannot swallow it. It can feel like your throat is closing up. I have already pointed out that water is in the air constantly, and considering that anaphylaxis is a reaction of the lungs, they'd just need to breathe in their allergen to go into shock. Frankly OP, you sound like you're grasping at straws to persuade us that this is possible and all you're doing is shooting yourself in the foot. Are you aware that anecdotal evidence is a logical fallacy? That most of us are drawing from a combination of school age biology, search engines and personal knowledge? That is what you're fighting and unless you want to persuade me that Heidi is an alien, I'm not going to be sold on the premise.
It's hard to let go of an idea for a story when you have already invested in it. But I think this is a case where you have to. Everything we know about how life on Earth operates tells us that this is simply not possible. An animal which is allergic to water is not compatible with life, and therefore would die immediately. The reports you have read of people who claim to not be able to drink water because it would cause an anaphylactic reaction are false. They are lying. These people would either die of dehydration due to not being able to drink anything, or would die of anaphylaxis when they attempted to do so. Claims that these people survive by drinking things other than water are, frankly, absurd. Milk, juice, cola etc. all contain high concentrations of water, so would cause the same reaction. Not to mention the point others have tried to hammer home that we are mostly made of water, so such a person would react to their own water content. The only way you can make this work in a remotely believable way is to make it science fiction. For example, a retrovirus drastically alters the pH inside the victim's body to the point that they are highly acidic or alkaline. This could cause burns on contact with water of normal pH, and if severe enough could cause death (for example by blistering the throat, causing oedema and swelling, and suffocating the victim). But you would have to explain how all this came about, why it only affected that one person, how the cells in their body were altered to be able to tolerate a drastically altered pH etc. The mechanism you are currently proposing simply does not exist, and cannot exist. It is fundamentally impossible, and you will never convince anyone otherwise - whether a rational person on a forum, or a reader of your story. You owe it to yourself to accept this and try to move on, either by altering your story to make it work in a science fiction context, or dropping the idea entirely and coming up with a different idea for a story.
Personally I think I could suspend disbelief sufficiently for this plot to work in SF. But that's a matter of opinion I suppose. A virus causing a mutation like this is highly implausible, but not actually impossible as far as I can tell.
It's a stretch, but viruses do work by hijacking healthy cells and reprogramming them to create more viruses, so it's closer to reality than the OP's idea.
