Elizabeth White, who has a severe allergy to peanuts, mixes her Fruit Roll-Up treat with a powder containing a minute quantity of peanuts.

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Elizabeth White's first encounter with peanuts — a nibble of a peanut butter cracker when she was 14 months old — left her gasping for breath. Within minutes, her airways were swelling shut. A mere one-fifth of a peanut was enough to trigger an allergic reaction.

So it was with trepidation that her parents enrolled Elizabeth, at 4 1/2, in a groundbreaking experiment: Could eating tiny amounts of the very foods that endanger them eventually train children's bodies to overcome severe food allergies?

It just may work, suggest preliminary results from a handful of youngsters allergic to peanuts or eggs — and who, after two years of treatment, seem protected enough that an accidental bite of the forbidden foods is no longer a huge threat.

"We're so lucky," said Carrie White, Elizabeth's mother.

Now 7, Elizabeth can safely tolerate the equivalent of seven peanuts. For the first time, the Raleigh, N.C., girl is allowed to go on play dates and to birthday parties without her parents first teaching the chaperons to use an EpiPen, a shot of epinephrine that can reverse a life-threatening reaction.

Don't try this experiment on your own, warns lead researcher Dr. A. Wesley Burks of Duke University Medical Center. Children in the study are closely monitored for the real risk of life-threatening reactions.

But if the work pans out — and larger studies are beginning — it would be a major advance in the quest to at least reduce severe food allergies that trigger 30,000 emergency-room visits and kill 150 people per year.

"I really think in five years there's going to be a treatment available for kids with food allergy," Burks said.

Millions of Americans suffer from some degree of food allergy, including 1.5 million with peanut allergy, considered the most dangerous type.

Burks and his colleagues at Duke and the University of Arkansas developed a type of oral immunotherapy.

First, youngsters spent a day at the Duke hospital swallowing minuscule but increasing doses of either an egg powder or a defatted peanut flour, depending on their allergy. The amounts were increased until a child broke out in hives or had some other reaction.

Then the children were sent home with a daily dose just under that reactive amount. Every two weeks, the kids returned for a small dose increase.

After two years, four of the seven youngsters in the egg pilot study could eat two scrambled eggs with no problem, researchers reported in the January edition of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

In the peanut pilot study, yet to be published, six of the children challenged so far could tolerate 15 peanuts, Burks said.

Kids are given tiny amounts to build tolerance