Peanut allergies?
 

What's up with all these peanut allergies?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051129/ap_on_re_ca/canada_deadly_kiss_2

There is a couple restaurants in my town that serve peanuts. One place, you throw the shells on the floor. yee ha. Anyhow, there was some hour long wait so we took some outside. They cmae out and *****ed because people who have peanut allergies might catch wind of them and die. I think they have a sticker as you go in to warn you of peanuts.

Another place in town has a sign that says "local children have peanut allergies please don't remove peanuts from restaurant." I know they are just trying to protect themselves from lawsuits (it's a chain) and I'm against children dying unecessarily, but jeez.

I have heard tales of children's parents not letting the other kids bring PB&J to school because their kid might die. Tough stuff. If your kid doesn't have the survival skills, are you really willing to subject his/her fate to all those randome (stranger) parents. Keep your kid at home in the bubble. Where do these people live? What if they were allergic to milk or bread?

When do people who have a special condition 1) take precautions on their own for the variabiity and unpredictability of life in general or 2) just freaking risk it, because something's gonna get you eventually? I certainly didn't go to school with any of these peanut allergy kids.

I'm interested to hear other thoughts.

There is a boy in my daughter's fouth grade class that has the peanut allergy. He carries a hypo in his backpack and the teacher is trained to give it to him if needed.

He came home with us one time and I asked him about it and he said "stick me in the leg and call 9-1-1, than call my mom."

OK, sounds simple.:eek:

This begs asking, what has changed in the last years in the peanuts? When I grew up we all had PB&J and not one child in a 2000+ person school ever got sick.

My nephew has a child who they insist is allergic to peanuts. They refuse to fly SouthWest Airlines as they serve peanuts. Not going to say that they are crazy but if they are correct something has happened to the peanuts in the last 20-30 years to make them different.

JoeA

True. Why all of the sudden has this peanut allergy become such an epedemic? :confused:

What I heard on the news tonight in lieu of the girl dying from her boyfriend's kiss, is that these allergies may be caused by certain peanut-based oiments and lotions that parents have used on children within the last ten years. Seems like a stretch, but then again, these allergies are so bizarre, anything is possible.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/conditions/11/28/kiss.death.ap/index.html

Interesting link and story but something else is going on here. This was unheard of 15 years ago so whats changed?

JoeA

how ****ed up would it be if you were the boyfriend?

More on possible causes of peanut allergy.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030315/food.asp

Seems there is some hope for eventually developing a treatment.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030315/fob1.asp

We've encountered one case of peanut allergy so far, one year a child at the kids' preschool was allergic so peanut and peanut butter were banned from school lunches. It wasn't any big hardship. Its just peanuts, a second-tier snack . . . be glad there's not a similar allergy to beer, or beef.

One further than banning BP in lunches, I have heard that kids arent allowed to have PB for breakfast before coming to school.

I have a friend who is allergic to nuts, especially peanuts. She lives in San Francisco (helluva place to be allergic to nuts, huh ;) ) and has been eating almost completely organic food for several years now. She says that some of her nut allergies are gone.

I think that most of the problems these days are due to the heavily processed food that is everywhere these days.

I was allergic to cats as a child. We tried to force all my classmates to have their cats put down so there would be no chance of cat hair on their clothes.

I have a co-worker with peanut allergies. He is the same age as me and has been allergic for 27 years. From what I understand, peanuts just make him vommit, violently, for hours. His grandmother is convinced that the allergy is just in his head, and sneaks nuts into all sorts of things. For example, this Thanksgiving, she put powdered almonds in the corn. He didn't make it to the bathroom in time.

I knew two kids with severe Peanut allergies growing up (back in the 60s/70s). They were so sensitive that they rarely went to restaurants. I recall the one time they did the young girl nearly died because the pan they used had peanut oil residue in it from a previous dish.

This confuses me too... maybe when I was a kid they all got 'weeded out' by kindergarten (w/ no offense intended to any that might suffer from this) and it just wasn't diagnosed and newsworthy? I can't imagine having that sort of malady...

That's f*cked up.

Granny would not be spared a severe ass-kicking if she pulled that kind of ***** on me (I have gluten intolerance--a known disease since the times of the Roman empire...and dutifully forgotten by US doctors trained in the 70's).

LOL!

My 9yr old son is deathly allergic to peanuts. He immediately and violently reacts. We carry an epi-pen everywhere we go, and read every label and ingredient in what he eats. It isn't in his head. Peanut allergies are very serious.

E

I think you can attribute this to the change in the substance of "news" and of course, the Internet now lets us know about everything. Probably lots of kids likely died early in the prior decades, and if the diagnosis was made accurately, few outside the medical community and doctors knew about it.

I had a friend whose sister in law developed an allergy to plastic. They moved to the coast and with great difficulty, were able to eliminate plastic from their environment. But she could almost never leave the immediate area of the house. I mean, think about how pervasive plastic is in our lives.

Since I have a young son now I've done some reading up on this as it does seem "new".

In a nutshell, many MANY more foods contain peanut products in them that are given to young children. The preponderance of peaut increases their sensitivity at an early age when the immune and digestive systems aren't capable of handling it, causing high sensitivities.

I think perhaps more global awareness and the increasing peanut content is responsible for this happening now. (I too used to think it was BS).

I've got a friend in his mid 30's that allergic to ANY poultry products. Talk about difficult!