You can also get high off oxygen, right? So best to avoid that in schools.
(I’m joking but please note I take actual allergies very seriously!)
Yep, its on my eternal “to do” list for all those reasons.
you know i’ve often wondered if this is the case. someone earlier mentioned the fact that these allergies are more prevalent in more affluent areas. this brings me back to my previous job working at a grocery store where they provided sanitizing hand wipes at the entrance of the stores to wipe the carts down with. now i worked in a few different neighborhoods and it was always in the more affluent ones that people (women 99% of the time) made a big show of wiping their cart down before putting their kid in it. in the more middle to lower middle class neighborhoods people used them sometimes but not nearly as often. these things only appeared in stores over like the last decade or so. somehow before we managed to soldier on without them and managed not to die off as a species. of course this is just an anecdote not data but i’d be curious to hear why else allergies are linked to people with money.
No one knows for sure, but some ideas are:
Hygeine, as you say.
Different common foods in different diets of kids - perhaps more affluent kids eat peanut butter frequently and at a young age, which seems to precipitate allergies. Maybe poorer kids are eating more cereal or lunch meat or beans and rice and less peanut butter.
Different common foods in the diets of their *mothers *- there’s some (not a lot, but some) evidence that eating a lot of peanut butter while pregnant or breastfeeding makes the child more likely to develop a nut allergy.
More awareness - perhaps more affluent people are home during the day watching their kids and notice smaller reactions, like itching or rashes, while poorer kids tend to be in group daycare situations (either commercial or with a relative) where caregivers don’t notice these things and bring the kid in for testing.
More diagnosis - as mentioned above, in order to be tested, the kid has to be taken to the doctor, and tests have to be paid for. If the primary doc doesn’t do that sort of testing, a referral to an allergist might be required, probably for an appointment on another day. That’s a day or two a parent needs to take off work to chauffeur the kid around to doctor’s offices. Affluent people can afford to lose the pay, or may be on salary, while poorer people are more likely to be working hourly with no leave. The problem, if it appears minor, may not be worth a doctor’s visit.
IgE antibodies, which are the types that we associate with hypersensitivity “allergic” reactions, are also the antibodies directed against parasites during parasitic infections. The theory is that in the developed world we have so few parasitic infections that our IgEs just go crazy on non-pathogenic antigens.
There’s this fairly well supported theory called the “hygiene hypothesis” regarding the correlation of allergic reactions (as well as other atopic conditions like asthma and eczema) with affluence. Basically the idea is that people who aren’t exposed to enough pathogens have T-cells which remain in the “immature” Th2 phenotype, and the Th2 cells are associated with allergic responses.
Better explanation here: Hygiene hypothesis - Wikipedia
My father is an allergist and has noted (Warning: racial stereotypes ahead) that while this theory has some support, one area of contention is the fact that in the US, African-American children are more likely to develop asthma and also are more likely to live in less sanitary conditions. No idea if either or these statements are true, or if anyone has looked at the sanitary conditions of African-American children specifically with asthma.
I also am good friends with a doctoral candidate in immunology and he thinks the hygiene hypothesis is well-supported and reasonable.
My son’s school board has a peanut ban, all the time. Last year (grade one) he was in a class with an allergic child and the teacher was the mother of this student. We got lists of things to avoid (including “mandella nuts” which are some kind of processed peanutty thing of which I had never heard.) Home baked goodies were “declined with thanks, celebrations of special days do not need food” so I couldn’t even send a Rice Krispie treat with a cinamon heart on top for Valentines day.
This year, the same peanut ban, but there is no one in his class with the allergy. Its a moot point because both my boyfriend and myself detest peanut butter. In fact, I think that’s why we are together. He had some doubts hooking up with a woman with a small child, because to him “small kids=peanut butter” and he loathes the smell of it. I told him that once you
travel the entire length of Lake Superior from Wawa to Thunder Bay ON vomiting peanut butter, you’re pretty much done with peanut butter for good.
Just thought of one more: poorer kids are more likely to have asthma. If they eat peanut butter and get a little wheezy, their parents may assume they’re wheezing because of the asthma, and not suspect an allergy.
In poverty-stricken countries where Unicef distributes “plumpynut” peanut paste to save starving, malnourished children, I guess the nut allergy issue doesn’t come up? Or is the thinking that saving thousands of kids is worth whatever may happen to the one or two who have a reaction? I know I have heard that different countries, with their different diets, have different allergy levels for foods. In a culture that gets most of its food from the sea for example, do people with serious seafood allergies traditionally just die and not pass on their allergy genes? Or does the allergy not occur in the first place?
I’m guessing if they DO die, it’s not connected?
I’m allergic to penicillin. I found it out the first time I had a toothache when I was about seventeen, and they gave it to me. I ended up developing severe hives. Okay, I figured that was a fluke. Well, the next time I needed antibiotics, they called and asked if I was allergic – only I wasn’t home, and my mother had forgotten the incident. Figuring, like I said, it was a one time thing, I ended up taking it – and again, broke out in hives. After that, I decided not to risk it a third time.
My kids school has one ‘peanut free’ lunch table. Any kid who sits there has to have no PB, but they can sit at any of the other tables. My daughter has a friend who has a peanut allergy, so on the days when she doesn’t bring a PBJ, she sits there with her friend.
Actually, both allergies and intolerances (reactions that aren’t hives, itching or wheezing, like aching bellies, diarrhea or headaches) happen more often with the dietary staple of a people. That is, gluten intolerance is rampant in Italy, where they eat a lot of wheat based bread and pasta. Rice allergies are high in areas of Asia where rice is a staple of their diet.
I’ve heard that not many Europeans eat much peanut butter. If that’s true, I wonder what their peanut allergy rates are, compared to ours. I’m too lazy to look it up right now.
Certainly lots of African countries’ cuisines feature peanuts. I’d be interested to see what their peanut allergies looked like both before and after we started shipping them peanut butter. But really, as said above, there’s no “safe” food that no one is allergic to. If we’d shipped them wheat instead, they might develop gluten allergies.
Our schools have one class per grade (up to grade 5) that is peanut-free and that class is also where kids with other allergies are placed, although only peanuts are forbidden outright.
My daughter wound up in the peanut free class in grade 1, when I said “sure, no problem” when asked if she could be assigned to that class, as there were not enough allergic kids in the school to fill an entire class.
What a pain it was – no packaged items in her lunch apart from chips/pretzels, no homemade treats, no cookies…luckily, she likes almost all kinds of food, but by the end of the year, even my non-picky child was getting bored of the same sorts of things in her lunch every day since so many of her favorites were forbidden.
She is in a “regular” i.e. peanuts are ok class now, and the teacher requests only “healthy” snacks like fresh fruit or veggies, and the same for class parties. Hey, no argument from me on the lack of sugar!
My son is in middle school and reports that there are no school-based restrictions on peanuts, apart from a request that bake sale items containing peanuts be clearly labelled to indicate that they contain peanuts. The kids are trusted to handle their own diets.
This sounds like my ex-wife (psychological problems for sure). She claimed to be allergic to tomatoes and would go to restaurants and specifically order stuff that normally has tomatoes in it. She’s instruct the waiter that there could be no tomatoes in her food because she would have a severe reaction to it.
Invariably, the dish would come out with tomatoes. She’d complain, demand a manager, get the dish replaced, and almost always get part of (or the entire) meal comp’d.
On top of that, she had me convinced for years that our son was allergic to tomatoes…that he’d inherited the allergy genetically. Until one day, at a family gathering, there was a vegetable tray out with cherry-tomatoes, and my son ate all of them, not realizing that they were tomatoes. No ill effects whatsoever.
Many parts of Africa rely on peanuts for protein- there are places where it would not be unusual to eat peanut products at every meal.
In these situations, a child with a protein allergy would not last very long. I doubt many people would be able to trace it back to the peanuts, however. For one, if you eat peanuts every day, you are not going to notice that X only happens when you eat peanuts. Secondly. there are a lot of things that will kill an infant and if you don’t have access to good medical care you probably are not going to learn exactly what happened. I think in many cases, the baby gets sick, the parents guess it is malaria (malaria tests have a large false-positive rate) or whatever, they give it whatever drugs they can find (which may well be counterfeit or just inappropriate-but-seemed-better-than-doing-nothing) and then the baby dies. Everyone just figures it’s one of the countless deaths by infectious disease.
I have 2 girls in second grade at a public school in Manhattan. If there’s a kid in a class that has a nut allergy, then nuts are banned just in that classroom.
At the school I worked at two years ago, there were 8 kids with food allergies (mostly nut) out of about 300 students. They were not the more affluent kids. One was a Vietnamese immigrant boy with allergies to nuts, seafood, strawberries and kiwi. He was a kindergartner, and didn’t understand very well what foods he had to stay away from. Consequently, he had to be injected twice that year when he ate the wrong food and started swelling and choking. Peanuts weren’t banned at that school.
My brother developed an allergy to nuts in his teens. My mother, to this day, thinks it’s all psychosomatic. Except that two of his three young sons are also allergic.
My daughter, 15, has just in the last year begun getting swollen, tingly lips and tongue after eating shrimp and crab. She had only rarely eaten them before, pretty much just shrimp platters at parties or meals at Asian restaurants.
ok so basically parents need to quit giving their kids wiis and iPhones for their 10th birthdays and let them go play in the dirt and ride bikes like kids do when they’re not given hundreds of dollars worth of electronic pacifiers before they’ve mastered long division. i mean i’m not particularly old (late twenties) and growing up we found shit to do which along the way involved getting germs and getting sick and building up an immune system. and while there was the occasional kid who had food allergies i never knew anyone who couldn’t even enter a room with nuts in it. the first time i read about the concept of “nut-free rooms” here on the dope i thought it was some kind of joke.
Peanut butter is not banned at the sprog’s school, but peanut products were banned by his soccer coach last year because one of the kids on his team had a peanut allergy. (Most of us sent fruit for post-game snacks, which is better anyway.)
I am about your age and sort of feel the same way about “kids these days” . . . that being said, I think “letting kids get dirty” is a bit of an oversimplification. Obviously modern advances in sanitation are mostly a great thing.
Although I can’t give you a good middle ground.
same here over in Melbourne,.