Tchaikovsky is nice, but what about a modern Christmas-season ballet?
Plot:
- Scene 1: Little Johnny walks over to the neighbor’s house wearing a T-shirt printed with “don’t feed me nuts” in 96-point type on both front and back.
- Scene 2: Little Johnny is on the sofa watching football on the big-screen TV. He absent-mindedly grabs a handful of cashews and peanuts from a bowl next to the couch.
- Scene 3: Dermatologist’s office equipped with a 12′-high spruce tree from which dangle pharmaceutical samples. Little Johnny is being treated for a nasty-looking skin condition.
Title: The Nutrasher.
Utterly implausible, I’m afraid. In 2015, little Johnny can’t possibly wander to a neighbor’s house without a helicopter parent hovering nearby every step of the way, ready to disinfect any surface that could possibly have traces of the dread peanut.
Jani: Excellent point. We can fix that with a new title: “The Nutrasher Fantasy”
As the parent of a young child, is there any real evidence I should be worried about peanuts? I’m inclined to vote no (after all, when I was a kid in the 1980s there wasn’t a plague of peanut deaths), but getting actual data seems very difficult. Of the top four google hits for “peanut allergy deaths per year” we find:
1. HuffPo article claiming the death toll is 150-200 / year
2. Mom’s Group, sort of like a MADD for peanuts, which thinks peanuts are en par with the holocaust
3. How Stuff Works, suggests the death toll is more like 75-100? Also helpfully notes that only 10 people die in the UK per year; either they don’t eat that many peanuts across the pond or they are less prone
4. PeanutAllergy.com (“your online peanut allergy resource”), no estimate of fatalities
Why is this data so hard to obtain?
Apparently we should be giving peanuts to all the little ones:
http://time.com/4018551/peanut-allergies-prevention/
http://nonutsmomsgroup.weebly.com/blog/remembering-those-we-have-lost-to-food-allergies lists 10-15 for a typical year in the U.S. from all food allergies.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meredith-broussard/food-allergy-deaths-less_b_151462.html cites CDC data of about 11 people per year from all food allergies in the U.S.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10452770 says 30 in 100,000 person-years is the rate of anaphylaxis with a death rate of about 0.19 per 100,000 person-years, but that’s extrapolating from just one death. If we think this single death gives us sufficient data, that works out to about 623 expected deaths per year in the U.S. from anaphylaxis (but that includes reactions to insect stings and medication).
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db10.htm says about 10,000 hospitalizations per year in the U.S. for children with all food allergies. If we take the same 1 in 153 death rate from the above study, we would get 65 deaths per year among children from food allergies. (Again, keeping in mind that there was just one death and that the study included reactions to insect stings and medication as well as food.) On the other hand, if there were deaths from these hospitalizations you’d think that the CDC would note that. So perhaps the number is 0 for children who actually made it into the medical system.
http://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(06)03814-0/abstract is one of the papers cited by the CDC. It suggests that the total number of deaths in the U.S. is about 6 per year from all food allergies.
Maybe ICD-10 will save us from this mystery! (See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/02/14/when-squirrels-attack-theres-a-medical-code-for-that/ )
Apparently Israel has a very low rate of peanut allergy and they think that the reason why is that Israeli children start eating peanut products early. The most popular snack in Israel is called Bamba. Bamba are basically the same thing as Cheetos/cheese puffs but are peanut flavored instead of cheese flavored. You don’t need teeth to eat them – they will dissolve in a toddler’s mouth if they gum them, so they are popular snacks for very young children as soon as they begin to consume solid food. It’s like an accidental national immunization program.