PatriotsReign

Prediction: Someday soon, restaurants, schools, hospitals and any public building won't be allowed to have peanuts anywhere on their premises.

I'm just guessing that allergies to peanuts must have increased dramatically since I was a kid because I've never read so much about how businesses have had to accomadate people with peanut allergies.

"More than 3 million Americans now have some kind of nut allergy, with cases of peanut allergy in children more than tripling between 1997 and 2008, according to a report released this week."

http://www.livescience.com/8268-pean...-10-years.html

So 1% of the population actually has the allergy...ONE percent.

So I'd still send your kids to school with a nice big PEANUT BUTTER sandwhich even such laws are passed.

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Mrs.PatsFanInVa

Actually, it's 2.1% of children.

The prevalence of combined peanut or tree nut allergies in children was 2.1 percent in 2008, compared to 0.6 percent in 1997.

Rate of childhood peanut allergies more than tripled from 1997 to 2008

Which means if you've got a school cafeteria with 300 kids it's a good bet that at least 6 or 7 of them are allergic to peanuts or peanut products.

It's good to know what you'd do with my kids, PR, really good. I suppose we can also count on you to explain to the mother of the kid who died of anaphylaxis caused by peanut exposure just how her trauma was caused, too, right?

Perhaps you're not aware that allergies to either peanuts or tree nuts cause about 80% of the 30,000 anaphylaxis cases seen in U.S. emergency rooms each year.

Perhaps you don't realize that anaphylatic reactions, which always require medical assistance, often end, forgive the word, but I'm sure you'll understand, tragically even if the total medical support offered by an emergency room and a physician is available.

Good to know you wouldn't mind being the cause of such a tragedy - or advising others to become the same.

I'm not sure any parent, if there is a child or a teacher in their child's class who has a severe peanut allergy and they were made aware of it, would ever send their child to school with even a teeny-tiny peanut butter sandwich - much less a "nice big" one.

What would be the point, PR? To prove that you have the right to send some other mother's kid to the hospital swollen up like a ballon and unable to breathe without mechanical assistance after being asked not to?

Now there's a point we'd all love to prove, I'm sure.

chicowalker

Are there any thoughts on why these severe allergies are increasing so dramatically?

Tripling in a decade is a huge increase.

When I was a kid, a couple decades earlier, I don't think anybody I know had this kind of allergy.

Mrs.PatsFanInVa

Several theories - all of them probably somewhat valid and it's most likely a combination of all of them which has caused the dramatic increase.

1.)that we introduce peanuts to children too early;

2.)the increased use of soy in formula and other processed food (soy and peanut are both beans);

3.) the use of roasted peanuts in food (heating changes the protein which the body is more likely to react to), rather than raw/boiled peanuts.

4.)The hygiene hypothesis which believes that our immune systems have little to fight anymore because we live in a cleaner, healthier, antibacterial world and therefore, the immune system reacts to certain food proteins and mistakes them for a threat.

5.)A lowered immune function due to increased antibiotic use, vaccinations, high processed food and pesticide use are also factors to be considered.

http://www.beyondapeanut.com/Peanut_...formation.html

Same thing with autism which was virtually unheard of when I was growing up and pretty uncommon even in my own kid's generation.

chicowalker

I've always assumed that one aspect of the rise autism was previous misdiagnosis (though there is absolutely no substance behind that ).

Some of these don't make sense to me, unless they, too, have changed dramatically over the past decade, and in the decades before that. (For example, the first one -- did parents start introducing their children to peanuts earlier than was previously the case, at least in a form separate from #3?)

Wolfpack

You wanna know the real reason behind why these sorts of things (like autism or ADHD or whatever) increased so much over the past decade or so? Because they get much more media coverage these days than ever before, so now everyone is on the lookout for such things in their own children/patients.

You expand the definition of what a certain affliction is, see something (even when it's not there) and all of a sudden you have far more cases of a certain ailment than ever before. Sometimes this comes about from an increase in knowledge of an affliction; sometimes it simply comes from an increase in paranoia.

Just because something is being diagnosed more frequently does not necessarily follow that it is occurring more frequently.

wistahpatsfan

I pick options 4 and 5. The others are easy to fix. The last two are impossible to fix and would result in lawsuits X infinity, not to mention the complete re-tooling of our entire economy. The damage was done after WWII and we are now in the process of paying the piper. Much of the damage has been done to the genetic viability of the reproductive system of my generation and the one before it. We pass on these genetic and epigenetic deformities to our children. I say this because peanut allergies are linked with other allergies and maladies like asthma, which is increasingly being linked to environmental factors and genetic susceptibility.

There's a non-allergenic breed of peanut available, but has yet to be approved by FDA (tool of corporate agriculture, mind you, so it might take a while)

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wistahpatsfan

Your last sentence is true. Your first two are pure speculation.

You left out the causation option of pesticides and chemicals in the food supply, air and water. Has that been ruled out?

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Mrs.PatsFanInVa

I don't know that much about it, Chico. Only what I've read and what I've observed. I did find out that using soy based formulas has decreased by 50% since 1999 - which may account for some of the current kids with peanut allergies since they would have been in that time frame of the 90's where soy was all the rage. There was a huge brou-ha-ha about children being "lactose intolerant" around then - and countless moms who did not breastfeed simply bypassed regular formulas and went right to soy - all the while thinking they were saving their child from developing a lactose allergy. (Which, while uncomfortable, seldom, if ever, causes anaphylaxis.) They are now finding all sorts of things wrong with feeding infants nothing but soy products and it is seldom recommended by pediatricians.

Soy Infant Formula Information

My personal opinion is that #4and 5 are probably more likely to be causes than the first three. I'm old enough and stubborn enough to believe that my grandmother was right when she'd laugh and say, "Oh every kid has to eat a peck of dirt before he grows up," when her grandchildren or great-grandchildren got caught eating something off the floor or shoveling sand in their mouths.

Parents nowdays are hyper-vigelant about using all these new disinfectant hand wipes and soaps and things.....all bodies demand some balance of flora and fauna - and that includes bacterias of all kinds. If you're never exposed to it you never develop a tolerance to it - nor does your body develop a balance of good and bad bacterias. We all need strong immune systems - but an infant who is never or seldom exposed to bacterias grows up in a body which is unable to recognize a threat and fight it because it's never seen it before.

In truth, most of the microbes on and around us are harmless and many are even beneficial¹. Bacteria naturally inhabit our skin, digestive tract, the soil, and our homes, helping to maintain a balance in both our internal and external environments.

There’s even mounting evidence that exposure to bacteria might be a good thing. According to the "hygiene hypothesis," bacterial assaults help children’s immune systems to develop. Studies have shown that inner city children, and children without older siblings, are more likely to develop allergies, asthma and autoimmune disorders because their immune systems are less regularly stimulated².

Read more: Antibacterials and Disinfectants: Are They Necessary? | Healthy Child Healthy World

And, honestly, you don't even want to get me started on the overuse of antibiotics. It's a personal pet-peeve and I believe someday we'll all die because of it.

Wolfpack

I'd say that we, as a society, are far more knowledgeable about (and protected from) pesticides and chemicals these days than we were, say, in the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. So no, I do not consider those to be an acceptable reason behind why peanut allergy rates tripled from '97 to '08.

If you're trying to find the cause of an increase in some sort of phenemenon, a good place to start is by looking at things which have changed since the increase began - not by taking something that started 50+ years ago and saying that explains a change which began in the 90's.