A 15 year old girl died from a peanut allergy.

Yahoo! news

What a horrible waste. I am so pleased that my children don't seem to have any of the life threatening allergies...yet.

My youngest son has a peanut allergy along with several others. We have to carry an epi-pen with us at all times. It is a constant worry.

Oh those poor parents. Imagine what they must be going through.

I feel pretty bad for the boyfriend, too. A tender age to have the kiss of death. (I'm not being flippant or trying to make light, it's just true.) I'm so glad my daughter doesn't have any allergies. The seeming increase in such allergies is alarming.

A sad story. One of my nephews is allergic to peanuts and has to carry,well his mum carries it, an epi-pen, I believe there is one at the child care centre he attends as well.

I wasn`t aware of of the fact that there are so many people that have allergies that are life threatening till I read up on my nephews problem.

Is this something that has been caused by environmental changes in the past couple of decades[like pollution etc] or has recognition of the problem only been widespread the last couple of decades or both?

Might be a little of each. I think the jury's still out on that. There are suggestions that early use of health and beauty products, like lotions, etc, early in life can cause problems. There are also suggestions that early introduction of certain foods, like peanuts, strawberries and broccoli, can cause allergies. When you consider the fact that it wouldn't have been unusual even 100 years ago for a child to be breast fed almost exclusively for the first year and a half to two years of it's life, and now many parents introduce solid foods as early as 4 months old, with NO breast feeding but only formula, there may really be something to that. But at the same time, severe allergic reactions have probably not been diagnosed as such until relatively recently as well, so it's tough to say.

With most health-related issues like this it's usually only the appearance of increases due to much higher population and diagnosis, where the actual percentage of the population is still roughly the same as it was before. But we don't understand allergies very well and I think the percentage of people with really severe allergies are actually doing more than just appearing to increase.

I think there is also some problem with the numbers, as some people report allergies who do not in fact have them.
This is a real annoyance in child care - we will be told by a parent that a child has a food or other allergy, and need to find out how serious it is, and what lengths we should go to to keep the child away from the substance. Almost always these are self diagnosed allergies - the parent noticed a rash one time, or something like that, decided that there was an allergy to a substance, and that's all they ever did about it. Now, this doesn't mean that there is NOT an allergy, maybe even a serious one, but really nobody knows. More than once, we have had children on restricted diets, sometimes very seriously restricted, and then once it all becomes too much of a nuisance, the parent will just give up, and voila! the child is no longer allergic!
I can't tell you how many times I have been told that a child is allergic to a food, and then a year later see her walking in with that very food in her snack bag - never a word to us, of course. Most of these have been of the non deadly variety.

We have one child with a serious peanut allergy, however - we have been told that we can have no peanut products on the premises, that he can only eat certain brands of chocolate chips, corn flakes, etc. Fine - the child has a health problem, we have no problem going to whatever lengths are necessary to keep him safe. I have been reading labels carefully for the last five years, making sure that he does not come into contact with anything that may have contacted nuts. I recently learned, however, that he has never actually been tested for this allergy. He had a reaction as a baby, the doctor said "This may indicate a serious peanut allergy, we should do more tests" and the mother refused. She was not willing to take the chance of testing him, even in the hospital. She insisted on getting a prescription for an epipen, and that's where it stands. So, maybe this boy has a deadly allergy. Maybe he has nothing at all, or the kind of peanut allergy I had as a kid, where if I ate peanuts, I would have an asthma attack. I didn't care, I liked peanuts and ate them anyway, endured the asthma (which most of the time I would get anyway, peanut or no) and eventually grew out of the allergy. Anyway, we just don't know, but we have to act as if it's all real, as the consequences are so severe.

We had another child who was not allowed to eat any food except that prepared at home - she apparently had allergies to just about everything. During her toodler years, this was very difficult to enforce, as she would see what the other children were eating, and want some, sometimes grabbing out of their plates (her own food was usually very odd and nasty looking concoctions). Anyway, we did what was necessary, a lot of extra work, because, again, the health of the child was at stake. Soon after her third birthday, she started refusing to eat the food her mother sent. She just dug in her heels, wouldn't eat anything. I offered, several times, to go over my menus in detail with the mother, so I could maybe eliminate certain offending foods, she would never meet with me. Then all of a sudden, over a period of about two weeks, the mother lifted all food restrictions from the child's diet. She was allowed to eat everything the other kids were - food dyes, milk products, everything. No ill affects whatsoever. I suspect the whole thing was imaginary, a way of making the mother feel special. Meanwhile, the child spent the first three years of her life eating beans, and some sort of greenish goo - often the same thing for weeks at a time.


Please understand, I am not saying that serious food allergies don't exist. They do, and they can kill. However, I also know that many childcare workers or teachers I have talked to have similar stories. The danger here is that people will get careless, because of all these parents crying wolf, and let their guard down when it really matters, and a child dies.

That's really interesting agony - I had no idea that parents were so silly about their children's eating habits.
It makes me wonder if it's a sort of Munchausen by Proxy - special attention for them and the child, and a reason to be home more, because no one can take as good care of their babies as they can.
I have a friend who has her Masters in Nutrition, and she feeds her kids all sorts of things that would never occur to me to feed to mine, but when they come here, they eat what we're eating, without a single complaint.
She has, however, asked that we not serve beef, and since I am allergic to chicken and am not a huge seafood fan - this rather limits us to pork.
The joke when we get together is 'how will we be having our pork tonight!'