Simon mentioned peanuts in his post about milk & Dr. Spock, and it
reminded me of something that's been sticking in my craw...

This is from an article that appeared in a teen-oriented newspaper insert
magazine called *react.* It was from the April 20-26 issue. The article is
entitled, "Look Who's Wheezing." It discussed why "more teens than ever
before are suffering from life-threatening allergies."

Among the reasons they listed: bad air, bad insects (cockroaches), bad
weather, bad everything else (here it listed cigarette smoke, stress, too
much time indoors and too many pets).

The one that bothered me was this:

"Too much PB&J. To develop a food allergy, you have to have had a lot of
contact with it at a young age. Americans eat an average of 11 pounds of
peanuts a year, and 90 percent of us have our first taste of peanut butter
by age 2.
But for allergy sufferers, even a tiny amount of a peanut product can
cause a shock, which in a small percentage of cases can be fatal. To
protect sufferers, many schools have declared classrooms peanut-free and
set up "no-peanut zones" in cafeterias.
'We had a big debate in our school when they banned peanut butter,' says
Michael Bordonaro, 15, a sophomore at Trinity School in NYC. 'But once
they explained that kids could really die from this, we understood.'"

I have several problems with this:
1) It doesn't necessarily take a lot of contact to have a food allergy.
All it takes is once. Or sometimes it takes years and years and you
suddenly find yourself allergic to something you've been fine with all
this time. (I know, the symptoms could have been more subtle this whole
time and they're finally come out full blast.)
2) If schools are really doing this banning of peanut products, I think
they're setting themselves up for having to do the same for those allergic
to milk or wheat or eggs or other common food allergens. After all,
they're supposed to treat all the students equally.
3) Is the percentage of those allergic to peanut products really that
high? Earlier in the article it says that "a recent Johns Hopkins study
showed that the number of kids allergic to peanuts--one of the most
serious food allergies--doubled from 1984 to 1994," but it doesn't say
what percentage that is. Again, unless the percentage is way higher than I
think it possibly could be, they are setting themselves up for having to
eliminate every product to which a certain percentage of the population is
allergic.

What do you all think?

Margo Mead
Portland, Oregon
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- sent via an evaluation copy of BulkRate (unregistered).