I had a classmate identify that I had just consumed peanuts because when he walked in the room, his lips started tingling. Some people really are that sensitive.
Just to emphasize this. I have a mild peanut allergy. When I was a kid, I’d get hives now and again and my mother would blame an allergy to whatever she happened to think of. No doctors and no science involved. As an adult, I was able to figure out that it was just peanuts. The reactions got stronger, but still pretty mild: hives, how annoying.
I think the extreme cases, and their reporting, make parents worried that any peanut allergy puts their kid in the same category as the kids who were so allergic that they died from seeing a peanut on TV. Zero tolerance for risk, but high tolerance for selfishness. After all, if your kid is only prone to mild hives, it’s still to your benefit to ban peanuts from the universe, right?
ETA: This isn’t to deny the difficulties of people who have the extreme reactions. I think the above just makes it harder for them, if anything.
Wait a minute, an unconscious 8 year old comes into the emergency room with hives and a swollen throat and they figured inducing vomiting was a good idea? Was this the Mengele clinic?
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a campaign in the near future to ban peanuts :rolleyes: :mad: I do feel sorry for those with severe allergies, but should the world revolve around them?
As a severely allergic person (thanks dad…) I don’t think it should. I personally am allergic to essentially anything I can snuffle up as well as to most fresh fruits and vegetables, and a few food intolerance problems. Not nuts tho, strangely enough - I suppose I got peanut butter when I was young. 
Anyway, due to the complete inability to control everything around a person unless they live in a bubble, I think allergic people (when they get old enough to be able to do this) should be responsible for themselves. Get treatment, be aware of what it feels like when an allergy is being triggered, pay attention to your surroundings.
I can see keeping peanuts out of schools but anyone who tries to control potential allergens anywhere other than their home is, IMNSHO, kinda self centered.
Well, maybe the treatment was something else and the vomiting just happened. I don’t remember very much after the passing out part.
[QUOTE=SweetLucy]
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a campaign in the near future to ban peanuts I do feel sorry for those with severe allergies, but should the world revolve around them?
[/QUOTE]
My mother had a saying: wait until your spanked before you start crying about it.
Roddy
I believe there’s also a bit of ‘shorthanding’ that goes around too which isn’t necessarily the fault of the sufferer.
My girlfriend is not allergic to pork, but she tells people she is.
This is because she gets life-threatening anaphylaxis from the spores of a specific kind of mold that grows on cured pork products: some sausages, salamis, chorizo, etc. - unless the pork has been cured with a lot of salt (e.g. Parma ham). It’s easier for her just to say “I’m allergic to pork” than it is to explain the precise nature of her allergy.
(FTR I thought she was Jewish when we first started dating.)
I think there’s also a gap in knowledge here we just haven’t conquered yet. I have no known food or medication allergies, yet after I turned 24 or so, I picked up allergies to damn near ALL pollens, molds, spores, trees, etc. If it’s green and it grows, I appear to be allergic to it. Not life threateningly so, but if I don’t want to go through life with an entirely stuffed up head, with no sense of smell, and deafness due to internal swelling, I have to have a daily regimen of OTC medication that’s, frankly, really expensive.
But I didn’t have it for the first two decades of my life!
Doctors (in general), have no clue why this is, and the only solution that’s not ‘treat the symptoms’ is a long term, expensive, we’ll just get you used to the stuff your system is reacting to in the hopes it gets used to it.
For all we know, we still don’t know WHY a body reacts the way it does.
what are you taking? Zyrtec?
Claritin D 12 hour, twice a day (the 24 hour doesn’t cut it), plus Zadator Drops (OTC for Patanol), and occasionally Fluticasine Propionate (Nasacort?)
I teach at a school with almost 800 students and had three kids this past year with peanut allergies. One girl was so allergic, we had to call an ambulance after she kissed her boyfriend at lunch. He’d had a granola bar with peanuts in it for breakfast. One smooch, and she was in anaphylactic shock–turning blue, the whole bit. Believe me, this girl didn’t feel special, just “stupid” and hated the allergy. It was very limiting.
I wonder if the reason we tend to pooh-pooh the allergies as being trendy or or stemming from parents wanting their kids to be “special” is that it bothers us that in some schools, our non-allergic kids can’t bring peanut butter sandwiches for lunch.
A little OT, but in my district, dogs aren’t allowed in schools any more because some kids are allergic to dander, yet there is a student who has a dog that accompanies her through the school day: she has a medical condition, and the dog alerts her if she’s about to have an episode. And on rare occasions, the school brings in the drug dog to sniff out weed. Kind of destroys the logic behind the no-dogs rule. Litigation. It all comes down to litigation.
ouch.
ETA: this was a response to Unintentionally Blank.
nm
My dad is deathly allergic to shellfish, as in “throat swells closed” allergic. So no clams, scallops, crab, shrimp, lobster, etc. But he can eat oysters. Whatever all those other seafood things have in them, oysters don’t.
Do people like you are nutz scan google for message board posts about peanut allergies every day or something, just to jump in with both feet telling people they are wrong? How do they find there way here and join up to post just about their personal bugaboo?
I am deathly allergic to mushrooms, and would love for it to be omitted from commercially available food products but I don’t google around looking for message boards about it.
Though I will confess to having been on a couple consumers boards for industrial foods previously, where I did let them know that they are an allergen for a lot of people, but I was invited to those consumers groups …
Well, I keep hearing that - and have never heard an example where a child was proven to NOT have the allergy his parents claimed. So I have to chalk that statement (wanting kids to be special) up to, well, :rolleyes:. Trust me, there are NO benefits to having your kid viewed as peanut-allergic when he isn’t.
I don’t know the actual prevalence, but I do keep hearing that allergies in general (and autoimmune diseases in general) are on the rise possibly because with all the cleanliness and vaccines, our immune systems don’t have anything else to work on. Essentially, they get bored and find something to amuse themselves :D.
As a parent of a truly peanut-allergic kid (known reactions to peanut exposures on several occasions, reactions to what we in hindsight thing was a peanut exposure on another), I can’t imagine why any parent would WANT their kid to be so labeled.
Peanut and nut allergies generally get worse with every exposure. Someone who only gets hives now will, over time, develop progressively worse symptoms with each exposure. So it is to their benefit to avoid exposure even though they only get hives from exposure now. Some day their throat might swell closed from one exposure too many.
When I was a kid, I thought I just didn’t like the taste of tree nuts. Eventually, I started breaking out in hives, and found that all those times I’d choked down tree nuts to satsify my mother’s irrational tirades against “picky eaters” I had also increased the severity of my reaction. My nephew, on the other hand, started right off with hives at 2yo, and will only get worse from there.
Other types of allergies – often the environmental ones like pollen, dander, etc. – tend to change over time. My allergist recommends retesting every 7 years for those kinds of allergens. You can pick up new triggers, or old triggers simply go away over time.
Food allergies generally do not behave this way. So you might get lucky and have your hayfever improve, but don’t plan on getting over a severe shellfish allergy.
This is a really good point, and in fact my example is a textbook case: I stopped eating peanuts altogether in college when the reactions started getting bad. If I’d been tested as a kid and the allergen identified, I could have avoided the last two incidents, which were terrible. Still no throat-swelling, but horrific hives down there… not good.
Mama Zappa writes:
> I don’t know the actual prevalence, but I do keep hearing that allergies in
> general (and autoimmune diseases in general) are on the rise possibly because
> with all the cleanliness and vaccines, our immune systems don’t have anything
> else to work on.
As I said in post #7.
I tell people I’m allergic to codeine and cilantro because codeine makes me freak out and start clawing at myself, and I have that gene that makes cilantro taste like robot piss.
Could peanut allergy have to do with so few of us buying them in-the-shell anymore? If you were anywhere near anyone shelling peanuts, you’d have to be breathing in little bits of gooberfiber.