Transplant Athlete Blog

Transplant Athlete

Monday, January 05, 2009

Since having kids, I've been embroiled in the peanut allergies debate. While discussing the subject with a friend at one of my daughter's gym classes, I was "educated" by some random woman who decided she needed to tell me how serious they are and what the proper precautions are for dealing with it (apparently you have to wash your hands, hand sanitizer doesn't get rid of peanut allergans).

My son's preschool is nut-free, my daughter's kindergarten isn't nut-free, but it has a nut-free table in the lunch room. The article link above is from Time Magazine and shows how crazy people get about nut allergies...Can you imagine evacuating a bus because of a stray peanut? These are not bombs people they are snack food. I overheard one mother telling another "We found out our kid had a peanut allergy in the womb." The other mother asked, "did you have him tested?" The response was, "why should we test him, we already know he's allergic?" I just about fell out of my chair, this poor kid will never get to taste peanut butter because his mom had gas while he was in her womb. With the fervor and insanity surrounding peanut free nuts(crazy people) there's much mis-information that gets passed from mother to mother.

If I've done the math right (and my sources are correct), you're more likely to die from(in no particular order):

Your clothes catching fire.
Car accident
Dying in your bathtub
falling from a ladder
Excessive cold
excessive heat
Drowning
Railway accident
Dying from gunshot wounds
dying from Diabetes

Odds of dying from a handgun assault 1 in 299, odds of dying from diabetes 1 in 4300, odds of dying from a vicious peanut attack...1 in 22,000. Let's have some proper education and responses proportional to the severity of the problem please.

Link ¶ 5:31 AM

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Comments:

Hey Lou,
Merry New Year! My friend's son has a horrible allergy not only to peanuts but most everything, he has a rare disease one of a few thousadn children in teh US has. Even one stray goldfish sends him to the emergency room with horrible symptoms. The poor little guy, a bout of nuts might kill him. That being said my girlfriend has to supervise him 24 hours a day until he's old enough to udnerstand what he can't eat, how awful! My siser also had her throat close up when someone didn't mention an ingredient in a recipe, she was rushed to the hospital blue with things in her throat so she could breathe. I agree a peanut on a bus is ridiculous, unless it's preschoolers who might eat it, but then again, removing the peanut would have been sufficient, not the children, qu'elle drame! ClareBear

# posted by

Anonymous : 11:25 AM

comment about previous commenters spelling/typing allergy elided

# posted by

Anonymous : 12:05 AM

Hi Clare,
My wife, ABL, has a food allergy that has in the past closed up her throat. She avoids those foods now, but she carried around the medicine for it for years. So, we know what it's like. For the super allergic, an epi-pen is safe, portable, and easy to use.
-Lou

# posted by

llamoure : 12:17 AM

Guilt By Association

I think the main issue I have with the mom's who go crazy over nut allergies is the snackfood guilt by association. For instance, My son wants to take pretzels to school today, so I grabbed a bag at the store yesterday. I didn't read the label, because obviously there are no peanuts in pretzels; however if I'd read the label, I would have seen that the pretzels were made in a factory that processes peanuts.
ERRRR. Strictly Verboten.

Now, there are no kids in my son's class that have nut allergies, and even if there were, they always bring their own snacks. As I've said, the school is nut free so, The preschool forbids snacks from factories that process nuts, even if there are no nuts in the actual product. That rules out some well known snacks like: M&Ms, Drakes Cakes products (like Devil Dogs, coffee cakes, Ring dings, yodels), Twinkies (my god they've banned Twinkies), Little Debbie Cakes etc.

I love Devil Dogs. Love, Love, Love them.

Are the pretzels (which do not contain nuts but are made in a factory that processes nuts) going to harm a child who doesn't eat them? I would think the kid would have to eat all the pretzels and lick the inside of the bag to get enough exposure to enough nut "dust" to cause a reaction.

# posted by

llamoure : 8:10 AM