By Seth Richardson
Eight-year-old Riley Mers and her peanut-sniffing service dog Rock’O hit the big time March 2nd with an appearance on the ABC evening news. As reported by The Gazette’s Brian Newsome in the February 16th edition, Riley can breath easier now that her Portuguese water dog is on the job. Rock’O’s nose is Riley’s protector, keeping her safe from accidental exposure to peanuts, something that could easily kill her.
Severe peanut allergies are serious business for sufferers because peanuts are a ubiquitous food in America. We should not minimize the danger to people like Riley who genuinely have a deadly anaphylactic reaction to peanut. But neither should we go into a peanut panic merely because there are unfortunate people like Riley in the world.
Too often, the reaction to sometimes dubious claims about peanut and other food allergies are blown far out of proportion by individuals and groups who may have ulterior motives, or may simply be misguided. No few school districts have simply banned peanuts from the schools entirely in order to favor a single student who claims a peanut allergy, or just to avoid all potential liability.
This might seem like a reasonable reaction, one of those “do it for the children” moments, but things are not quite as simple as they might appear. The fact is that the number of people who die from allergic food reactions each year is incredibly small, and keeping peanuts away from your kids may be doing more harm than good.
The numbers of people who have any kind of food allergy, and most of the time such reactions are mild to severe, but very rarely fatal, is subject to much speculation. Dr. Darshak Sanghavi reported in the Boston Globe in January, 2006 that a researcher at the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN) said that while about a quarter of parents believe their child has a food allergy, in reality only about 4 percent actually do. The Archives of Internal Medicine reported in 2004 that the chance of an average person of suffering from food-induced anaphylaxis is 4 per 100,000 per year, about the same number of people who die from lightning strikes.
And it seems as if the problem is getting worse. Between 1997 and 2002, The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology reported that rates of peanut allergies among children had doubled, from 0.4 percent of the population to 0.8 percent, although the data was not verified by tests. In another 2003 study from the Mount Sinai Department of Pediatrics, researchers conducted a telephone survey to determine the prevalence of self-reported peanut allergies among the general population as a follow-up to a 1997 study. The study, which surveyed more than 13,000 individuals, concluded that between 1997 and 2002, the reported rate increased from 0.4 percent in 1997 to 0.8 percent in 2002.
The FAAN is an advocacy group for food allergy sufferers that works hard to educate people about food allergies, but appears to have a tendency to overstate the actual risks. The most-often heard claim is “100 to 200” people per year die of food allergies. But Meredith Broussard, a journalist in Philadelphia, in her December, 2008 article in the Huffington Post says that the CDC reported only 11 deaths from all food allergies in 2005, and Dr. Rahul K. Parikh, in a February, 2009 column at Salon.com wrote that deaths by food allergy reported by the CDC for 2004 was 14, and that between 1994 and 1999, only 33 such deaths were reported.
But here’s the real twist. Another study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology by the King’s College, London in November 2008 compared peanut allergies in Jewish children in the UK and in Israel. Results indicated that children in the UK, where Jewish children virtually never get peanuts, are almost ten times more likely to develop peanut allergy than Jewish children in Israel, where peanuts are a common food even for infants 8 to 14 months old. The study asks the question whether the early introduction of peanut during infancy, rather than avoiding peanuts, will prevent the development of peanut allergy. This study seems to militate for exposing kids to peanuts quite early in life, rather than removing peanuts from society.
So, it seems as though all the peanut panic is a bit over-blown. For people like Riley, it’s a very big deal, but for most of us it’s a non-issue, and the precautions that Riley’s parents are taking are the appropriate and reasonable response to a severe, life-threatening peanut allergy. It’s a perfect solution for Riley and for her classmates that doesn’t deprive them of a favorite food and doesn’t put Riley at unreasonable risk.
After all, school isn’t the only place one finds peanuts, and protecting yourself if you have a food allergy is no different from protecting yourself if you have casual sex or you like to walk downtown at night carrying large sums of money and jewelry. It’s up to you to protect yourself, it’s not up to society to forego peanut butter, or anything else, in order to protect you.
Parents, if you think your child has a peanut allergy, then get them tested so you’ll know for sure. If you kids don’t, then by all means feed them peanut butter, and start early, so that they won’t develop one later.
And let’s all support Angel Service Dogs so that kids who are really at risk can afford to live their lives free of the fear of a life-threatening illness.
© 2009 Altnews
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[...]Peanut panic? Nuts! – The Broadside : Colorado Springs Gazette, CO[...]…
Eric:
The issue of “reasonable accommodation” for the disabled is a thorny one indeed, and I agree that people who abuse the law for their own personal gain are reprehensible scum.
The key here is “reasonable.” Businesses are not required to accommodate every single possible disability or provide absolutely equal services to every disabled person. This would be an impossible burden to any business, given the vast number and types of disabilities that are covered under the ADA.
It is not the duty of businesses to make life easy for everyone, it’s their duty to look to their profit margin, and imposing too great a burden of accommodation on any one business can end up shutting it down.
Riley’s misfortune is a perfect example of the appropriate balance between accommodation by businesses and personal responsibility by the disabled. The business must accept Rock’O's presence, and Riley must avoid businesses that use peanut products.
Society needs compassion for the disabled, but it must not pander to them, because pandering to them is patronizing and only fosters a sense of victimhood, rather than a sense of accomplishment and belonging. It’s a fine line we tread, and for the most part, it works out well. For people like the idiot in California, it’s a demonstration of their lack of character, and they should be made social pariahs for such behavior, disability or not.
But, there are legitimate exercises in testing the accommodation features of businesses as well. There are a number of advocacy groups who do much the same thing, although they try to work with business owners to resolve problems rather than simply trying to extort money out of them. It’s important to support such groups because there are businesses that simply refuse to abide by even the most basic requirements of the ADA, including things as simple as wheelchair ramps and accessible bathrooms. Sometimes these businesses do it out of economic necessity because the renovations would be truly burdensome, but sometimes they just choose to ignore the law, sometimes because they are aesthetically offended by the presence of disabled people, and those businesses need the full weight of the law to fall upon them.
If everybody’s reasonable about it, things usually work out fine, but zealotry on either side of the issue is not productive or useful.
Seth-
I like your overall point that you are trying to convey: that just because some people have a problem, doesn’t mean it should be all our problems.
All to often, and increasingly more and more so, our society is playing a ‘race to the bottom’. I use that term to mean that we are so fanatical about ‘accommodating’ everyone that in the end it makes it worse for the vast majority of people.
One particularly disgusting example I recall is a man in California whose self-stated ‘job’ is suing businesses that don’t accommodate handicap people. He goes to fast food places, tries every single thing possible, then when finds something he can’t do, issues them a subpoena, or an offer to settle out of court for a few thousand in dollars.
The restaurants comply, because its easier to pay this ‘noble’ man his few thousand then the tens of thousands it would cost to totally retrofit the whole restaurant.
I was talking to a friend of mine who is a lawyer (so bias is likely…) and he said to not blame this man, but to blame the society that allows action like this to be profitably.
Now that is how ‘accommodating’ can be disgusting and totally ruinous to any sense of logic.
The peanut allergy epidemic seemingly came out of nowhere. What needs to be done is a serious study to learn what made it come about. Older generations lived without the fear of eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Trick or treaters used to receive home made peanut butter cookies from friendly neighborhood spinsters. At the private school I attended every child got a peanut butter sandwich with hot chocolate on certain mornings. What caused this sudden rise in allergic reactions? Is it our environment? Pesticides and antibiotics in our food supply? Pollution? Chemicals in upholstery and carpeting? There has to be some reason. Obviously, it wasn’t hereditary. The peanut allergy is a cause for serious concern. If so many children are affected, we should be searching for a cause. If we don’t consider this as a preventive measure, we can only expect to have more and more allergies coming out of nowhere. The solution needs to encompass something more than allergen-sniffing dogs.