Now that is inexcusable by anyone’s standards. I’ve helped raise a kid, and one of my personal “agendas” was to make absolutely sure she knew a few certain things.
Just because someone is older doesn’t make them right. Some people are just stupid. (That is how I put it too).
You always have the right to question something, and “because I said so” is bullshit.
Nobody can tell you what to do with your body, except YOU. That includes to food items.
Anyone who has a problem with 1 through 3, can see me or the parents and we will “explain” to them.
So far it has worked very well for ummmm 14 years.
<<The increase remains largely unexplained but has been blamed on causes ranging from antibiotics to food additives and pesticides.
Research has found children are not born with allergy to peanuts and other nuts, but develop it in early childhood. Those who develop rashes and eczema in early infancy might be more vulnerable and some experts advise caution against bringing these children into contact with nuts at an early age. >>
<<Between 1997 and 2007, the number of children under 18 who suffered from food allergies jumped 17%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Experts don’t disagree that the incidence of food allergies has increased, but there isn’t much consensus as to why. Some researchers suggest that an overly hygienic lifestyle may hamper the body’s ability to build up proper immunities; others believe the statistical rise is a combination of a real increase in allergies and an increase in the number of patients seeking diagnosis (i.e., getting allergy tests that turn up very low levels of reaction that might otherwise have gone undiscovered). “You have to distinguish between an epidemic of diagnoses and an epidemic of allergies,” says Christakis. >>
Heck, the reason plush dolls (of any kind, materials and size) are marked “over 3yo” is the risk of choking on glass or plastic eyes. Even if the daycare takes kids 4+, there’s a much higher risk of a kid that size choking on nuts than for an adult.
The daycare to which The Nephew went aged 2 had a specific policy forbidding nuts, MnM-style chocolates, chewing gum and hard candy on center grounds. I don’t know if it ever happened, but they told parents that if they tried to go pick up their kid while chewing gum they’d be told to go drop it at the trashcan outside (they wanted the kids to understand very clearly that You Can Not Have That Here).
Well, whatever anyone may think about nut allergies or any allergies or whatever, if the nursery says they have a nut-free room, they should have a nut-free room. If nothing else, it’s a breach of contract or false advertising (presuming the daycare’s policies count as advertising).
Your daughter didn’t have a problem with the nuts that were in the room, then? Or did she not enter the room? Of course, they should have still followed the policy they said they’d adhere to, but, from your POV with a child who has allergies, it might be helpful to know that she’s not one of those who does have strong reactions to nuts just being near her.
Oh, my daughter’s like that! She doesn’t have any other allergies or intolerances, fortunately (I have them all :() but she has this one, presenting differently: if she eats nutella, her poo comes out looking like nutella, and just keeps on coming out for a couple of days with barely a break. Her underwear just has to be thrown away because those stains do not come out. It’s not going to kill her, and doesn’t even hurt, but it’s not something you want to deal with at home, let alone at school.
Our theory is that it’s some intolerance to whatever is used alongside nuts and chocolate when the two are put together - some additive, probably. (We haven’t been to the doctor about it because it’s a) so obvious when it happens that there’s no doubt and b) not that big a deal).
Not really. Allergies (that is, anaphylactic ones that cause your respiratory tract to swell up, not sensitivities that give you a tummy ache) are often cumulative. The minor reaction of today might be the major reaction of tomorrow, and there’s no way to know when your wheezy kid who can walk it off will become the kid whose airway closes from an airborne exposure. Generally speaking, though, reactions get worse with each additional exposure to the allergen.
In fact, if you needed one more reason to be pissed at the daycare, their actions may have further sensitized your daughter, making her next attack more likely to be deadly, not merely inconvenient. Even though she didn’t have a visible reaction, there’s that many more peanut proteins in her system tonight triggering the production of new antibodies to make her immune system freak out. I’d suggest checking the dates on your epi-pens and review their use with your daughter, just to be safe.
I know, but it would still be comforting to know that she’s not that sensitive yet. I’m not advocating further exposure. A couple of weeks ago I spent half a thread pointing out that food allergies are different to some other allergies (like dog hair, for example), and that nut allergies are different again. (I wasn’t the only one pointing that out, of course, but there were doubters).
Between fifty and one hundred Americans die each year from allergic reaction to peanuts.
Source: ABC News
It’s not always an ingestion of the peanuts themselves that causes problems. One case involved a young woman who died from kissing her boyfriend who had eaten a cookie or a sandwich earlier that had peanuts.
Older children understand that they can’t eat things that are not from home. But day care aged children don’t. They are just learned to share (and take away!)
Mosier, which one of those fifty deaths is melodramatic to you? All you have to do is Google “peanut allergy” and the truth is there. Teacher training in how to handle allergic reactions to food is not unusual now.
Spending several hours at a party that was filled with smoke, and, according to the coroner, probably smoking pot herself. The official cause of death was an asthma attack. (Nine hours had transpired between when the boyfriend ate the peanut butter and when they kissed.)
I only skimmed the thread so I don’t know if this has been answered or not. Yes, there is a licensing body that regulates childcare facilities. This is one of the things they should know about.
muldoonthief, it took a bit of googling but I found the licensing agency for your state. http://www.eec.state.ma.us/ Please do report this. Bad daycares stay in business because people don’t report these things. You can also file a complaint with your local police station.
I readily admit that the probability of me getting flamed for this post approaches one, but people are inordinately scared of peanut allergies, especially for children. The way the media reports it, you might guess that anthropomorphic four-foot tall peanuts stalk your children on the way to school with bats in-hand just waiting to take little Johnny out, but I’m more sanguine.
The widespread availability of blood and skin-prick testing for peanut allergies tends to overcall peanut allergies, and those laboratory-based “diagnosis” of peanut allergies may or may not correlate with any clinical symptoms on actual exposure to peanuts.
In terms of overall childhood mortality, peanut allergies ranks up there with lightning strikes and mountain lion attacks.
In fact, I’m willing to mail off $5 to the first poster that can provide citations for a series of four children under the age of 12 (at which point we might be able to say that the onus to keep children safe from peanuts begins to shift from institutions like daycares and schools to individuals) in the past 15 years who have died from peanut allergies.
An attempted census of peanut allergy deaths in the UK:
“The UK under 16 population is 13 million. Over the past 10 years, eight children died (incidence of 0.006 deaths per 100 000 children 0–15 years per year). Milk caused four of the deaths. No child under 13 died from peanut allergy. Two children died despite receiving early epinephrine before admission to hospital; one child with a mild food allergic reaction died from epinephrine overdose. Over the past two years, there were six near fatal reactions (none caused by peanut) and 49 severe ones (10 caused by peanut), yielding incidences of 0.02 and 0.19 per 100 000 children 0–15 years per year respectively.”
Data from the United States is surprisingly difficult to come by. The most frequently cited article which hazards to take a census of child food anaphylaxis deaths is this one:
In the above study, 32 food anaphylaxis deaths are identified from 1994-1999 from the national food anaphylaxis registry maintained by the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology identified 32. The article contains tables of all of the identified cases, and none of those cases fit the parameters of my wager. They identify three children under 12 who died of food allergies, and none of them were due to peanuts (milk, fish, and brazil nuts were the culprits).
I teach preschool part-time, and we’ve always had at least a handful of kids with various allergies, including peanut and nut allergies. We are not allowed, by state law, to keep Epi-Pens in the classroom, but they are easily accessible in a closet in the director’s office. They’re each in a large Ziploc bag with the child’s name on it in large letters. We have training at the beginning of each year with Epi-Pen trainers. We have one teacher who is a former nurse, and I’m also an EMT, so I think we’re pretty well covered in how to use them.
There’s one woman, however; who each year asks, “So should we run all the way down to the office and come back with the Epi-Pen?” I point out every freakin’ year that it would be better to scoop up the kid and go to the office. It never seems to sink in with her. :rolleyes:
(I work full-time as an EMT, so I’m pretty much the go-to girl now for all injuries and suspected illnesses. I’ve seen more bloody noses and scraped knees and bumped heads than I can count.)
As for having a nut-free room - that’s just not possible at my school, as it’s a small private preschool and not a daycare. We are always aware of which kids have which allergies (dairy seems to be more prevalent than nuts lately), and we tell the parents in the beginning of the year that there is an allergic child in their child’s class, and that all treats and snacks must be nut-free or dairy-free or whatever.
We also have a mid-day lunchtime program, and if there’s a kid with nut allergies enrolled in it, we make sure the parents know about it, and ask them to label their child’s lunch if it contains nuts. In one case, there was a little boy who was severely allergic, and we did not allow any nuts in lunches that year. Usually just asking them to label lunchboxes is enough. We make sure that the nut-kids eat at one end of the room, and the nut-allergic kid and anyone else who has brought a peanut-free lunch sit together at the other end of the room.
