What is it with people and tomatoes? Thankfully I don’t have a deathly allergy to tomatoes, but I was eliminating them from my diet at one point because of an intolerance and went through the same thing. I selected an item from the menu that wouldn’t have tomatoes in it, and when ordering I checked with the waitress, who looked at me like I was simple and said that dish doesn’t have tomatoes in it. When it arrived, the side dish was tomatoes and zucchini, and the meal was on top of it. Spite or incompetence? I think the latter.
Close friend had a son with a severe peanut allergy. She would pre-board the plane and completely wash down the seats, arms rests, trays etc with wipes to get any residual peanut dust up. His allergy was so severe that they rarely could travel by plane since the recirculated air made peanut dust move throughout the cabin.
I always feel awful for people with that level of allergic severity. It’s hard enough when you have to constantly police your food. It’s damn near impossible to police the air.
It can be hard to make people understood about these reactions, especially in restaurants. And cross-contamination is no joke. This week my coworkers and I went out for Indian food for lunch, and I think there was some cross-contamination with tree nuts. I didn’t need my Epi-pen, but there I drank some Benadryl and the three doctors I work with kept an eagle eye on me that afternoon.
Keep in mind that an airplane is a totally enclosed environment with recirculated air. It’s not the same as someone on the street 15 feet away eating peanuts.
At any point in your life you can develop a new allergy, and allergy can get worse… and rarely, it can even go away.
I acquired the pea allergy sometime in my late 20’s. The barley allergy showed up in my early 40’s. I’m hoping I don’t acquire too many more because I’d like to be able to eat in my old age.
Stay out of the woods then.
Heard as an oral report so no cite, some doctors posit that the improvement in asthma experienced by some patients upon starting school or leaving for college is due to less anxious hovering on Mama Bear’s part.
There’s a WHO guide for what should be done to clean/disinfect commercial aircraft. It recognizes that pretty much all that could be expected during the course of a day with multiple flights is to remove litter and wipe down surfaces in the lavatory (and that time might not even permit this to be accomplished). It’s only after the plane is out of service overnight/for an extended period that a complete job could be done (and one suspects all the items on this list do not get done, based on costs and time allowed):
http://www.who.int/ihr/ports_airports/aviation_guide_p2_en.pdf
Not that airlines would be eager to cooperate, but a comprehensive study assaying bacterial/viral levels in various places as well as contaminants/chemicals of various sorts (to include peanut traces) would be interesting to see. There’s already evidence harmful pathogens could survive for extended periods on such aircraft.
And yet, amazingly, I only found one online source that actually gave a story credit: all the others were “apparently” individually written by individually credited reporters,
It used to be that stories were credited to Reuters, or to Associated Press, or to some other wire service. It seams that online news services don’t do that anymore. Either that, or hundreds of reporters just happened to be in airport terminal when Fae landed.
How does one discover that their child has an allergy to peanuts? Are all babies tested for it or something? I ask because I have a six month old grandson who is getting ready to start eating solid food soon.
My friend’s son’s allergy was detected as a baby because she had eaten some peanut butter and then happened to kissed him. He broke out in hives and started wheezing. Purely accidental. Babies aren’t routinely tested for allergens, at least in my experience.
Advice for starting babies on solids is to introduce 1 new food every three days so you can more easily identify what caused any reaction. Six years ago the advice on peanuts was to wait until the child was at least 12 months old but I think they’ve changed that recommendation now. I’ve read about parents giving their child their first taste of peanut butter in a hospital car park which seems like overkill unless there’s a family history of allergies or other reasons to suspect the child could be allergic.
Found a link! Peanut butter parties: http://mobile.news.com.au/national/mums-do-taste-test-outside-hospital-in-case-of-allergic-reaction/story-e6frfkvr-1226200173153
Thank you!
A lot of this story is supposition, there’s no proof that the man eating peanuts caused her reaction. I think that if my child had a severe allergy like that I wouldn’t take a chance like that. Planes are notorious for passing around germs etc. I’d only go somewhere we could drive to or something, I certainly wouldn’t put the responsibility of my child’s well-being in someone else’s hands.
I worked at a fundraiser at a memorial and awareness campaign for a young girl with a severe peanut allergy who died after eating a Subway sandwich at a food court. Even though the restaurant didn’t serve anything with nuts in it, they did share a counter with a cookie company, so it was theorized that some trace nuts remained on the counter. Or perhaps a worker ate a peanut butter cookie and didn’t change his/her gloves.
It made me take allergies much more seriously. So very sad. I wonder if her severe reaction would have ultimately led to her demise sooner or later. Nuts are so common; how do you avoid them entirely?
http://www.allergykids.com/blog/emilys-story-a-food-allergy-angel/
A long-ago friend was an aircraft mechanic for a large commercial airline. At the time when airlines began to ban smoking on board, he said, “Now watch everybody get sick.”
Not that he was any fan of smoking–he wasn’t; he disliked it greatly–but because smoking was on board, aircraft had to pull in fresh air, pressurize it, and exhaust “used” air. If I recall his remarks correctly, fresh incoming on-board air lasted about a minute or two before being exhausted. He said that with a smoking ban, airlines could “stretch” on-board air a lot longer, giving airborne germs and whatnot more time to settle in the cabin.
No cites, I’m afraid, just the remarks of a long-ago friend whose qualifications allowed him to speak knowledgeably. Still, I remember him saying “Now watch everybody get sick.”
I haven’t heard the “asthma due to Mama Bear’s nervousness” trope in years!
But given that my generation was pretty free-range and my mom was told to not hover and take it in stride…
…and that kids today go to the ER for sprained wrists and stuff, and that “helicopter parenting” is a real thing…
…I can see the point.
You become really obnoxious…er, I mean, assertive. And your parents have to kind of give you permission to say, look, I need 911 and my epi-pen NOW. (No kid wants to be the weirdo.)
Well, that’s how I manage. I can even ask if the sauces at an Indian restaurant contain cashews, in Hindi. I can’t say anything else in Hindi. (I also end up going to Indian restaurants with people from India, which helps as well.)
There are peanuts in the bizarrest places – some places use it to thicken spaghetti sauce. What the hell?
One thing I noticed with the story – no one was concerned that she felt really hot, or had asked if her face was flushed. That’s a huge sign of impending anaphylaxis.
It sounds as if the parents didn’t really receive good counseling about signs of anaphylaxis, nor did they realize that the method Emily was using to “test” food isn’t exactly safe. If there’s any doubt, DON’T EAT IT. And realize that if your child has that level of allergy, at some point she’ll need the Epi-Pen, and might as well get used to the idea. So sad that they didn’t (it sounds like) get good medical counseling.
Yes, a huge reason why her parents started the website was to educate people, including allergy sufferers who think that they have it all figured out.