Food Allergy High

I was driving around Vancouver the other day and caught a snippet on CBC radio about new BC legislation designed to protect kids with serious food allergies; it’s called the Anaphylactic Student Protection Act and requires schools to educate and prepare staff for a student’s allergic reaction and try to limit contamination of potential allergens in cafeterias and classrooms. Check out the bill here. The bill was modeled on an Ontario law, Sabrina’s Law, named after 13-year old Sabrina Shannon who died in 2004 after eating french fries at her high school cafeteria that were likely contaminated with dairy.

While the laws are focused solely on education, cleanliness and treatment delivery, the radio show quickly turned to discussions of “banning” certain foods including peanuts, as many schools have already done (check out the nut free policy of Cliffwood Public School in Toronto - yikes!)

Now as many of you know, I am deathly allergic to peanuts and tree nuts. Fun for me. But I didn’t develop my anaphylactic reactions until I was 19 (and at a university ball no less; ask Anne about it sometime, she was there and she has pictures). During my elementary and high school years I used to just throw up. Gross, but not deadly.

So personally, I am a little torn about all this. Yes I want more things to be nut free and for, when possible, cafeterias and restaurants to try and eliminate cross contamination. Because if you try and eat out with me, you’ll know how hard that is. NO ONE will guarantee nut-free food. I usually just ask whether they put nuts in there ON PURPOSE, cause if not, I’m usually fine. I can taste traces for sure, but an eeeensy bit won’t kill me. And that is the difference between me and some of these super sensitive kids. I can take a little and not die. They can’t.

Should schools ban nuts and milk and eggs? Er..that’s tough. Public schools should be safe places, but we are dealing with invisible amounts of proteins here. When a child (or grown up) is that sensitive you can never be truly safe unless you control everything. In short, these kids are kind of screwed. So they survive high school - what about everywhere else?

But I think there is real hope on the horizon in the form of new food allergy treatments. Wesley Burks at Duke University has had some success with highly controlled feeding trials - where kids (and adults) essentially build up tolerances to peanuts by consuming ever greater amounts, starting out from 1/1000th of a gram. It might not “cure” the allergy entirely, but the treatment means that kids can withstand up to a whole peanut! before reacting. And that is the difference between life and accidental death.

There are also anti-IgE shots (that bind the antibodies that recognize allergens) that seem to increase tolerance (though some law suits over who owns the drug are complicating things); Burks and peanut research master Hugh Sampson at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC are working on peanut vaccines; Sampson is also working with his Chinese colleagues to produce a herbal mixture that seems to totally block allergic reactions (though it’s still in the mice stage).

What’s more, Gideon Lack at King’s College in London has begun a seven year trial to see if FEEDING peanuts to young and at risk babies/toddlers (who already have eczema) might actually prevent the development of food allergies - as all the advice to AVOID allergic foods in the first years of life has seemingly NOT worked.

Also, why not just have a petting zoo at every preschool? Kids would love it and studies consistently show that kids exposed to farms and farm animals are less likely to develop allergies. Better yet, why not just give every child pints of unpasteurized milk, as a recent European study found that ‘farm milk’ reduce allergies and asthma in suburban kids. Of course the same can be said for kids with loads of parasites...which is why some companies are thinking of using pig parasite eggs (that can’t survive and reproduce in people) to treat food allergies. All these treatments are essentially based on the hygiene hypothesis - if you keep your immune system busy with a variety of real threats from parasites, viruses, bacteria (even the “good” bacteria found in raw milk or yogurt), it will have less free time to go around attacking harmless foods.

So even though food allergies are seemingly on the rise, it’s a pretty good time to be born a nut sufferer, if you ask me.