The Peanuts
Now, parents at many schools are told to keep peanuts in any form out of their children’s lunchboxes and away from school lockers.
March is Peanut Month.
In the 1800s, American scientist, educator, and inventor George Washington Carver used the peanut to revolutionize agriculture in the Southern United States. Through his efforts, peanuts became both a source of food and a source of products to improve the quality of life for impoverished farmers. He created or influenced the development of over 100 products made from peanuts, including cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline, and nitroglycerin.
Times have changed; things are different today.
Now, parents at many schools are told to keep peanuts in any form out of their children's lunchboxes and away from school lockers. Some sports venues have peanut-free zones; some airlines ban peanuts to accommodate allergic passengers. And some experts say anti-peanutism has gone far enough.
Can this really mean the days of the classic peanut butter and banana sandwich numbered? Not according to Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard Medical School internal-medicine specialist: "The problem is that the anxiety about nuts is far out of proportion to the risk."
Dr. Christakis studies medical sociology and argues that dramatic measures like peanut bans taken by schools with allergic students are part of a mass hysteria that has developed. Magazine and newspaper articles with titles like "Everyone's Gone Nuts" and "Allergy scares are making people nuts" are beginning to appear.
"The cycle of increasing anxiety, draconian measures and increasing prevalence of nut allergies must be broken," Dr. Christakis declared recently in the British Medical Journal. A bus serving his child's school was emptied of passengers and cleaned out when a single peanut was discovered on the floor. He asks us to consider why we don't take such dramatic measures to combat much greater threats to our children, like car accidents.
Since 1990, peanut and other severe food allergies have become pervasive in Western culture. Less common—but sometimes as potentially lethal-are allergies to tree nuts, eggs, shellfish, and milk. Those in most danger suffer anaphylaxis, where the body's immune system overreacts and can dangerously impede breathing. The only known treatment is quick administration of epinephrine, a form of adrenaline.
Allergy experts say the numbers of those with food allergies are growing, and it is a dangerous condition that sometimes requires preventive action by schools and other public institutions. However, misconceptions about allergies have heightened fear and skepticism around the subject. Some allergists say schools don't need to ban peanuts outright, and that depriving young children of potentially allergenic foods might actually make them more likely to develop allergies.
A British study compared about 5,000 Jewish children in the U.K. who rarely ate peanuts as babies or toddlers and a similar number in Israel who started consuming peanut products early on. The British, peanut-avoiding children were 10 times more likely to develop peanut allergies, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
Bans are necessary in daycares and kindergartens where children can't be counted on to take precautions against nut contamination, Canadian allergy experts argue, but that some extreme measures are unnecessary. Most disagree with school-wide bans among older children. Instead, they recommend alternatives, such as stopping students from sharing food and setting up nut-free tables in cafeterias.
The idea that an innocent food can threaten a child has certainly contributed to fear about the condition. So have some factoids that suggest an allergic can go into anaphylactic shock simply by smelling peanut vapours or having peanut touch their skin. There is no evidence to support either notion, experts say: only ingesting a peanut can trigger anaphylaxis.
However, peanut butter on a child's skin can easily get into a child's mouth or eyes. And dozens of airline passengers opening bags of nuts can release enough nut dust that allergic seatmates might breathe it in. Could at least part of the answer lie in common sense and common courtesy?
Happy Peanut Month from Spacelocker.com
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