How common is milk allergy?

Cow's milk is the most common food allergen in young children (source: Jane Clarke: Yummy Baby). Anything from 2-7% of babies will have a cow's milk allergy (I can't pin down an exact statistic - let me know if you can), but most will grow out of it by the age of 3 (hurrah!).

My experience

I had no idea of this when I first suspected that my baby could be intolerant to milk. Having stopped and started weaning three times (at first I thought it was food she couldn't tolerate, not the formula I was mixing her purees with), and being woken by a crying baby every 45 minutes from midnight onwards, I was at breaking point. As an experiment, I started making up her food with water. Almost instantly, she was fine. She went back to waking 2-3 times a night to feed, but settling back peacefully to sleep each time (instead of screaming as soon as I put her down). Two weeks later, I reintroduced a tiny amount of milk (about 15ml) and the problems returned straight away.

Instead of taking me seriously, the health visitor dismissed my concerns, saying it was just a 'coincidence', and told me not to bother seeing a doctor as they definitely wouldn't prescribe a hydrolysed formula. She told me to carry on breastfeeding until 8 months and try milk again at that point. If I had known that most children grow out of this allergy by age 3, not 8 months, I wouldn't have done this. I weaned my daughter on a dairy-free diet, and when I gave her 80ml milk in a bottle at 8 1/2 months, she was up all night, had diarrhoea, and cried and cried. I felt terrible that she had to go through that, and very angry. It was at that point I went to the doctor and demanded to be taken seriously - but I still haven't had any advice about nutrition, or a referral to a specialist - hence all my online research and starting this blog.

Cow's milk protein allergy is not ultra-rare... around 1 in 20 babies suffer from it. So why was I dismissed so quickly? And why isn't there more information available about it? In another post, I'll go into the different formulas available for babies who can't digest cow's milk. Frustratingly, my daughter is refusing to drink them as they taste very different from breast milk and cow's milk (quite bitter/starchy). I feel that if I had started her on them earlier, it might have been different. But we'll never know!

More upbeat and practical posts to follow, I promise, but I wanted to give a bit of personal history/context to start with. Please feel free to share your own story below.