Oh, and way to induce eating disorders in the kid’s classmates. Searching backpacks and lunch boxes? Confiscating food? I can tell you from bitter experience that eating disorders can take get established at a very early age. And taking away a five-year-old’s lunch sounds like a perfect plan.
You were certainly quite the ass in the original thread, but I’ll forgive you because this bit just cracked me up. Well done!
Shalamanese, IIRC.
I am also siding with Diogenes here. If a child is allergic to peanuts, you monitor what that child eats. It is absolutely retarded to try and monitor what the other 2,000+ kids bring for lunch. Typical public school overcorrection.
Thank you for the science lecture! I’m forever grateful that you deigned to share your infinite wisdom with us peons.
I guess that means you can’t smell peanut butter. Oh wait, you can. That means particles of the substance in fact do fly through the air and hit your nose. Kids may leave a little peanut butter on a communal surface, or on their hands, and it is easy to spread it (especially peanut butter, which is sticky). Finally, as mentioned in the other thread, kids will often forget and share food, or even not know that their food has peanut butter in it. That’s how I ended up in the emergency room with our daughter.
Your argument is still the ravings of a psychotic. You are saying that once informed that something is lethal poison to a person, and the school having warned parents of it and asked not to bring the poison to school, you would increase the amount of poison your daughter takes with her.
I’m sorry but MY kid takes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to school EVERY DAY because it’s about the only thing we can AFFORD for him to take. If your kid is allergic then he/she needs to figure out how to STAY AWAY from my kid when he’s eating DUH.
as far as the OP goes, I agree that Dio should have toned it down a bit but damn, no need to go off on him.
If your kid is so sensitive to tree nuts that minute particles measuring in the one part per ten thousand causes him to be hospitalized, then he should not be in that school.
I take DtC’s side as well. One kid should not have the power to inconveinence other peoples lifes. He should be inconvienced. As in kept in a bubble in a hospital or something.
It would be different if it this type of allergy was much more common at this level of danger. Then you would be inconveinencing a whole lot of kids, but saving an equal number of allergic kids.
I’m sorry that your child has to suffer empmark, but you are expecting too much. 50 childrens happiness is much more important than one child with a bad medical problem. Put him in a special school. He can ride the Jiffy-Free bus, and have lunch without the fear of minute particles causing him to die.
Well, I’m sure that if DtC understood the impact of allergies on peole’s lives, he would apologize because I believe him to be a good person at heart who would not genuinely wish harm to a child.
As tempting as do-it-yourself eugenics might seem to some, killing off kids with allergies is not only grossly immoral, but also ineffective. Genes for allergies are not always expressed, so merely throwing Reeses Pieces at allergy sufferers won’t eliminate the genes from the population.
My heart goes out to Emarp’s daughter and all those who suffer from life-threatening allergies that keep them from enoying the foods most of us eat with impunity. Not being able to eat peanut butter is missing out on of the great pleasures of childhood, IMO. And it isn’t just a matter of eliminating peanut butter from school lunches; peanut oil is a common ingredient in many foods, so peanut allergy sufferers have to negotiate a dietary and environmental minefield most folks can’t even comprehend.
He did raise a legitimate question though:
Why were there never any peanut allergies long ago?
Vanilla: Why are we worried about smallpox when it’s eradicated? Why do people still get the measles?
That the allergies exist is a fact. The how or why doesn’t really matter.
My SWAG: There was but when a young child died from it was probably chalked up to unexplained reasons or something else. It probably took awhile to connect the nuts as the cause. I do not think their medical knowledge concerning allergies was as good as it is today.
ah, I see.
I am glad for advanced medical knowledge.
Maybe eventually they’ll be able to cure it.
vanilla: is it possible that people with severe allergies to nuts died early in childhood years ago? and improved medicine and awareness of this problem is why there are so many more surviving people with nut allergies?
No cite for this, just common sense.
Yes, but on a messageboard dedicated to fighting ignorance, hows and whys are supposedly worth pursuing.
Perhaps more information on the hows and whys could lead to a better solution for the allergic.
And I do find it odd that these allergies weren’t as prevelant in my childhood. Were we just not aware of them, or has something changed in the environment, genepool or collective psyche to cause them? Surely knowing more about the cause would be helpful toward finding a solution.
To analogize a bit, there is a concept I’m going to steal from the ADA called “reasonable accomodation.” In the context of the ADA, it means that you have to make accomodations that are reasonable to allow a disabled individual to be able to work at your business. E.g., you gotta provide a $20 computer screen magnifier so that your near-blind employee can work at the computer.
It does not mean that you are required to force all of your other employees to wear polyester because one employee has a severe allergy to natural fibers. In that case, you are justified in refusing to hire that employee.
What is the reasonable accomodation here - to tell 2,000 other kids and their parents that they can have no contact with peanut products before or while at school, or tell the allergic kid’s parent that the school district will provide (peanut-free) tutors for the kid at home?
I’m going with the solution that doesn’t infringe on the life of thousands of other people. Diogenes has pissed me off on more than one occasion, but he is dead on here. For a very few people, some commonplace, normally beneficial things are dangerous. The solution is for those very few people to avoid those commonplace, normally beneficial things, not to deprive the rest of the world of said commonplace, normally beneficial things.
Sua
And I’m with you, Sua. I just thoughtDiogenes was being a flaming prick.
Sua, I was going to raise that point in the GD thread, but since I haven’t kept up with it since last night, it seemed to be mired in extremist thinking.
emarkp, you have my sympathy for your daughter’s allergies. No one has the right to tell you or her that her allergies are all in her mind, nor does anyone have the right to marginalize her on the basis of her allergies.
However, you don’t have the right to make demands for her that cause others to suffer. The school district in California that is the focus of the thread is financially strapped and unable to meet its basic objective. Its basic objective is to educate all of the students of the community, not accommodate one boy’s medical problems. As others have suggested in the thread, perhaps this child would be better off being homeschooled or in a school that is able and willing to accommodate his needs. Or there could be some common ground and the boy’s parents could contribute to the salary of a medical aide to free the district’s money up to hire more educationally appropriate personnel for the rest of the students. Yes, some hard choices have to be made. But to tell a schoolful of children to pay the piper so one child can dance seems very unfair.
Robin
This instantly reminded me of some comic, or perhaps a Dave Barry column, I heard or saw long ago – reacting to the issue being raised as to whether airlines should stop serving peanuts in-flight (and perhaps even ban them). The comic facetiously joked “are there second hand peanut particles floating around”?
So I just did a google search, and to my surprise, the phrase “peanut particles” pulled up lots of hits. This just applied to peanuts, not peanut butter, according to the news stories that came up. I don’t know if “second hand peanut particles” are for real or not – I’m not a peanut scientist, after all – I’m just reading the articles I found.
I have to agree that the notion of banning all peanut or peanut butter products from every other kid’s lunch is way over extreme – a ridiculous policy. And probably more effort to enforce than to simply keep a more careful watch on the child with the allergy. DtC’s expressing of it is less than tactful, to say the least.
I found this article to be interesting, as it indicates that some of these types of food allergies may originate because the child is exposed to certain foods too early, before their immune systems can handle them.
I also found this article interesting, as it reports on a more recent study and suggests a way to combat the effects of the allergic reaction if peanuts (or “peanut particles”?) are accidentally ingested.
Well looks like the apocalypse is coming, because I agree with Dio100%