Here’s a surprise: Allergies to peanuts and other foods are much less common than people think. From a medical column in the Boston Globe:
Even among those truly allergic, few have life-threatening reactions.
While food (and, particularly, peanut) allergies make headlines — like the Canadian teen who died last November after kissing her boyfriend who’d eaten a peanut butter sandwich — the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2004 reported that the average person’s chance of food-induced anaphylaxis is about 4 in 100,000 per year. Roughly the same number of Americans each year die from lightning strikes as from peanut allergies.There are costs to the peanut scare: Children told they’re allergic to peanuts feel more restricted than children who are diabetics. I guess juvenile diabetics have to learn to manage their illness while allergics feel helpless to protect themselves.
Finally, despite their best attempts to avoid peanuts and carefully read labels, the average person with true peanut allergy still gets a reaction every three to five years. Yet only one in three parents of allergic children has a potentially life-saving dose of EpiPen nearby and knows how to use it.My niece was supposed to be allergic to peanuts. Recently, she was tested. No allergy.
This is the nut graf:
“about 25 percent of parents believe that their children have food allergies, although only about 4 percent really do.”
Yuppies want their kids to be special, and if allergies are special, then they want allergies.
My sister is one of the “real” cases. She always got sick on peanut-based/containing products with increasing severity as she grew up, to the point where she was at a chinese restaurant a few years back, unwittingly ate food cooked in peanut oil, and was in the ER a few hours later as her throat began to swell shut. The doctor there said that at the next exposure, she may only have minutes, not hours. She carries an epinephrine injection with her at all times now.
Amusingly enough, my parents actually DIDN’T think she had a legitimate allergy when she was younger and simply thought her a finicky eater.
The inflation of the number of ‘allergies’ also correlates with the inflation in the number of kids who are ‘ADD’ or ‘ADHD’ or ‘Asperger’s” or ‘ODD’, or ‘OCD’. There is, however, a vast amount of people in the U.S of A who are severely allergic to common sense and wisdom.