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Peanut Allergy Risk Overexaggerated

I wonder if there any figures on school children who died in the 1950s and 1960s from what would have them been "unknown causes," that can be now interpreted as an allergic reaction to nuts? Or is it that these allergic kids are now surviving long enough to enter school, where previously they might have died in infancy?

Another thought: I suspect these allergies have been with us for a while. I've heard suggestions that our fanatically clean culture (anti-bacterial stuff all over the place) coupled with kids simply being outdoors less these days is giving rise a generation of children with overactive immune systems. (Is this counter-intuitive? Usually something atrophies if it isn't stressed or exercised.)
 
Blue Mountain said:
I wonder if there any figures on school children who died in the 1950s and 1960s from what would have them been "unknown causes," that can be now interpreted as an allergic reaction to nuts? Or is it that these allergic kids are now surviving long enough to enter school, where previously they might have died in infancy?
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Basically. Peanut butter is a common food for infants. In the past, they simply died too young to have friends to miss them, and too young to pass their genes on to offspring.

The expansion of first aid training has meant that these allergic reactions rarely end up in death anymore.

We're two generations into this, which means that the .5% of births with the predisposition become part of the overall population.

Bee allergies is another example, but bee stings are much rarer than nuts in food.

I think I Ratant is correct if he's arguing that most people describing the allergy probably don't have it, but not correct in assuming that it is an invented problem - fatal food allergies have been with us for as long as we could recognize the condition. My great grandfather's brother died as a child in the late 19th century after eating shellfish - turned blue and suffocated at a picnic. Traumatized the whole family.





Blue Mountain said:
Another thought: I suspect these allergies have been with us for a while. I've heard suggestions that our fanatically clean culture (anti-bacterial stuff all over the place) coupled with kids simply being outdoors less these days is giving rise a generation of children with overactive immune systems. (Is this counter-intuitive? Usually something atrophies if it isn't stressed or exercised.)
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There's some suggestion that excessive cleanliness may be leading to less effective immune systems because of reduced immune memory 'experiences', but not that it leads to more allergies. The latter is just the increased survivability and fecundity of people with these genetic predispositions.
 
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It's an "invented problem" to the genuine sufferer in that the correct diagnosis is shortcircuited by the popular diagnosis.
No doubt there are a few persons who are allergic to peanuts, but not to the extent we are led to believe.
Genetic problems can't be epidemic, except in very restricted situations, like the hemophilia in the descendants Queen Victoria, or the Habsburg lip.
 
I Ratant said:
Genetic problems can't be epidemic, except in very restricted situations, like the hemophilia in the descendants Queen Victoria, or the Habsburg lip.
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No, but they can be recognized suddenly. Topically, this is the primary explanation for the 'explosion' of autism: two generations ago, they were just lumped in with the mentally delayed and not identified seperately. A clinical recategorization is not fraud.



Also, as mentioned above, genetic conditions can suddenly become more abundant in the population due to a sudden increase survivability from even one specific technological advancement. 50 years ago, CF was much less common, too, because nobody with the condition lived very long. But improvements in management in the 1960s meant the number of people walking around with CF exploded suddenly, to what is probably the real baseline genetic frequency.

ie: the reduced number of childhood-death-by-food-allergy quite naturally corresponds to an increase in coworker-with-fatal-allergy. Perhaps our generation notices the change, but once it reaches its natural baseline genetic frequency, it will be less visible as an issue.
 
Also remember, as a kid, if someone outside your home town died as a result of a violent allergic reaction, chances are you didn't hear about it. But now we have cable, blogs, online news, e-mail, etc. The simple ability to disseminate information may account for some of the apparant rise in occurences.

Also, once it is noticed, it is more likely to be noticed. I recall when my dad bought a new Ford Taurus. Suddenly, everywhere I looked there were Tauruses (Tauri?) all over the road. I'm pretty sure sales didn't skyrocket that week. I was just more aware of their existence.
 
Exactly. I keep seeing people say on comments sections and elsewhere that "there weren't no such peanut allergies when I was a kid". Well, those kids with severe peanut allergies probably just died. I knew a kid in a grade above me that died of an asthma attack, but people still try to say nobody died of asthma attacks twenty years ago.

This is precisely why anecdotes are so stupid. Nobody in their personal experience can possibly know how many kids had severe peanut allergies umpteen years ago. There was no internet to look up statistics on for one thing.

I hated eggs when I was a kid. They made me feel sick. My allergy to them wasn't confirmed until my twenties. Not a severe allergy, but enough for a skin rash and tummy ache.
 
From the little reading I have done, there seems to be a strong suspicion that there is a real increase in peanut allergy. I don't know why people are referring to it as a solely genetic problem, as exposure to allergens at different time periods (including prenatal exposure) also seems to be important. For example, current advice is not to give peanuts to young children who have a disposition to allergy (family history, or eczema etc), but this advice is based on theory rather than trials, so they are currently doing a trial in which kids at risk of developing peanut allergy are either kept away from peanuts in the early years, or exposed to them, to see what difference this makes, and give more solid advice to parents.
 
Professor Yaffle said:
From the little reading I have done, there seems to be a strong suspicion that there is a real increase in peanut allergy. I don't know why people are referring to it as a solely genetic problem, as exposure to allergens at different time periods (including prenatal exposure) also seems to be important. For example, current advice is not to give peanuts to young children who have a disposition to allergy (family history, or eczema etc), but this advice is based on theory rather than trials, so they are currently doing a trial in which kids at risk of developing peanut allergy are either kept away from peanuts in the early years, or exposed to them, to see what difference this makes, and give more solid advice to parents.
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But possibly not a consistent rise across the world, as per the OP? Also there appears to be a genetic predisposition to developing any allergy (tied to when and how you are first exposed), tied to also developing eczema or asthma.

I don't know if I picked up on messages of avoidance more because I'm asthmatic and many sources of information were linking asthmatic parents with peanut allergy children but there is certainly, in the UK, a clear message there. In some of the literature I received from the NHS it wasn't to simply not eat peanuts while pregnant, it was to not feed the child anything peanutty till they were at least 3 years old. As I was already aware that places with constant exposure/no avoidance have lower incidences of peanut allergies (and also my small knowledge of what allergies actually are) I ignored this. Was I right? So far, my kid hasn't developed an allergy to anything (or eczema, or asthma) but, as blutoski says, perhaps these children never survived long enough before to be diagnosed with an allergy.

As a quick answer as to why it's peanut allergies that the focus is on, rather than, say, my husband's particular allergy (mice), LEAP do a nice page on it.
 
Delvo said:
What's the difference between exaggeration, overexaggeration, and underexaggeration?
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I think exaggeration is when there is just enough exaggeration, overexaggeration is when there is too much exaggeration and underexaggeration is when there hasn't been enough exaggeration.

As in the title to this thread, "Peanut Allergy Risk Overexaggerated". There is a correct amount of peanut allergy exaggeration and some people are exaggerating it too much.
 
The anecdote somewhere above, about the great-grand uncle who died at a picnic, got me wondering. It sounded a lot like choking, but was credited to anaphylaxis due to shellfish. Was it choking? Or, conversely, how many historic chokings were actually allergic anaphylaxis?
 
Naughtyhippo said:
As a quick answer as to why it's peanut allergies that the focus is on, rather than, say, my husband's particular allergy (mice), LEAP do a nice page on it.
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I'm thinking that LEAP may be one of the over-exaggerators? Learning Early About Peanutallergy? They say one in seventy children?
 
casebro said:
The anecdote somewhere above, about the great-grand uncle who died at a picnic, got me wondering. It sounded a lot like choking, but was credited to anaphylaxis due to shellfish. Was it choking? Or, conversely, how many historic chokings were actually allergic anaphylaxis?
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I would have thought it could be significant. With choking you have an obstruction of the airways due to food being stuck there and with anaphylaxis you have swelling of the upper airway leading to the same physical symptoms to both the victim and observers. In both cases the victims will be touching their throat, displaying obvious visible and auditory signs of breathing difficulty and displaying blue/gray colouring on extremities and lips. Unless the throat is examined after death for signs of blockage it's going to be hard to know. (This is based on first hand experience of kids choking on food and my daughter who has a serious milk allergy.)

On a related note I was surprised when reading the official death records from a hundred years ago that were on display in our local library the lack of details as to why people had died. The symptoms of their death were often quite vague and the final causes that were written, for something had to be written, was really only the observed symptoms before they had died and not the underlying cause. From this I would say that our increased knowledge as to the causes of death have greatly increased over the past 100 years and the sort of vague reasons given back then would not be accepted these days.
 
Yeah. I remember listening to a converstaion my Dad had with a friend. In 1960. "Ole what-his-name died." Of what? "Old age. He was 63!".

Now certainly nobody dies of old age. Maybe it's been cured in the mean time?
 
I'm confused, luchog. For the kids with peanut allergies they can die from an exposure. As for kids without peanut allergy, who is scaring them away from peanuts?

If I'm baking cookies for a group of kids, it's best to not use nuts unless you know all the kids. That's what the usual cautions are about.

And kids do accidentally eat nuts. We are paying for every fire engine in King County to carry epinephrine, the vast majority of which is tossed on a regular basis when it expires because some poor girl on Mercer Island died from a peanut allergy and 911 wasn't called in time. The first responders were EMTs who didn't carry epi at that time. The Medics came only a few minutes later. The real problem was the family waited too long to call but the family focused on the extra few minutes it took the Medics to arrive as the cause of the death. The family got legislation passed and we now get to waste millions on stocking epi on every fire engine as well as training every firefighter to give it.

But the child did indeed die from her peanut allergy after eating a cookie she shouldn't have.
 
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skeptigirl said:
I'm confused, luchog. For the kids with peanut allergies they can die from an exposure. As for kids without peanut allergy, who is scaring them away from peanuts?

If I'm baking cookies for a group of kids, it's best to not use nuts unless you know all the kids. That's what the usual cautions are about.

And kids do accidentally eat nuts. We are paying for every fire engine in King County to carry epinephrine, the vast majority of which is tossed on a regular basis when it expires because some poor girl on Mercer Island died from a peanut allergy and 911 wasn't called in time. The first responders were EMTs who didn't carry epi at that time. The Medics came only a few minutes later. The real problem was the family waited too long to call but the family focused on the extra few minutes it took the Medics to arrive as the cause of the death. The family got legislation passed and we now get to waste millions on stocking epi on every fire engine as well as training every firefighter to give it.

But the child did indeed die from her peanut allergy after eating a cookie she shouldn't have.
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Wouldn't it be more sensible to pass legislation requiring parents of allergic kids to carry the epi? Heck it would probably be cheaper even to pay for it for them.
 
Prometheus said:
Wouldn't it be more sensible to pass legislation requiring parents of allergic kids to carry the epi? Heck it would probably be cheaper even to pay for it for them.
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My mother caries an EPI pen all the time because a bee sting could kill her.

I can't imagine not carrying an EPI pen if had a child with a life threatening allergy.

That said, one should be in any well equipped EMTs bag.
 
Prometheus said:
Wouldn't it be more sensible to pass legislation requiring parents of allergic kids to carry the epi? Heck it would probably be cheaper even to pay for it for them.
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You are preaching to the choir. This is one big waste of millions of taxpayer dollars because a parent could not face the guilt they only had an expired epipen. They projected their guilt on to the fire department and politicians think more of their image in these matters than their task of proper allocation of resources.
 
Kestrel said:
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That said, one should be in any well equipped EMTs bag.
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Not in this county. Our system has Medics who carry the epi.

All first responders are EMTs and can defib and provide all basic life support. The Medics are dispatched to all scenes where advanced life support is required. The response time for Medics is usually <5min. Dispatch can send the Medics or the fire EMTs can call for them after they arrive.

This system works very well and the problem with this child's death wasn't the Medic response time. King County's Medic One system is world famous for saving lives.
 
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