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dwein003

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What's Happening Now

June 28, 2010 12:09 pm

Mr. Aldrich:
Please read the earlier posts on this topic. One would hope that you are a reasonable enough individual that if someone came to you and said that “Eating peanuts next to me could make me really sick – please don’t do that” that you would not choose to ‘resist’ this person.
This is a matter of life and death to some people, so I would hope that, if faced with a situation, you would show others that you can be a considerate person (despite your message above).
Thank you.

June 23, 2010 5:39 pm

I am the father of a 5-year old with a severe peanut allergy as well as a physician and a medical epidemiologist. While I have been fortunate enough to not experience an anaphylactic reaction in my son, I have seen patients with anaphylactic reactions. They are terrifying for everyone involved, even in situations where you are surrounded by trained staff, abundant medications and crash carts.

The way I see this issue is that it is balancing the risks and benefits of peanuts on planes. The risks are pretty obvious and encompass death and less severe reactions that, at a minimum, are likely to result in an emergency landing.

The benefits of serving peanuts on planes are limited to the fact that most people like peanuts and they are fairly inexpensive.

I have seen on this discussion board… more »

…arguments that people have the right to eat peanuts, that people with allergies should wear masks or other personal protective equipment (extending to full body suits), that people with allergies should not fly, etc… These arguments seem somewhat petty, impractical, and outdated, respectively. Petty because it is not a major sacrifice to go without a bag of peanuts. Impractical because trying to keep an N95 (particulate) mask on a young child for up to 6 hours just cannot happen. Outdated because in modern US society with families spread across the nation travel is often the norm.

For people who say ‘Just don’t travel on planes’, I assert that they are missing the point. It is not as if dealing with a severe allergy is not already lifestyle altering. I will never be able to take my son to a major league baseball park; we will never be able to go down the street for ice cream on a hot summer day; we cannot go to a Chinese restaurant. This is all OK because these are luxuries. Furthermore, if we somehow do find ourselves in a hazardous situation, we can just get up and leave. On an airplane, that is not an option. There is no getting up and leaving (and just the act of changing your seat is a challenge).

So, the way I see it is that the risks associated with serving peanuts in a closed environment where the ability to provide medical care is limited clearly outweigh the benefits of serving peanuts both on a societal and cultural level (because the very real risk faced by children and adults with severe peanut allergies far exceeds the benefit of airlines serving peanuts).

This is a clear choice. « less

June 24, 2010 2:45 pm

There is a question of practicality here. Peanut allergies (and other food allergies) at the current time are becoming increasingly common in children. For a hypothetical cross-country flight with a young child, how can you keep an N95 mask on them for 6 hours (the masks for particulates are not the thin surgical masks but the far thicker versions)? Seriously??

While I appreciate that a person may require peanuts to be ‘comfortable’ as asserted by csleep2, I would ask this individual to consider this proposition more fully, as I suspect that 6 hours of screaming from said toddler while the distraught parent struggles valiantly to keep the surgical mask in place will result in far greater discomfort than the loss of the 2 ounce bag of airplane peanuts. But I could be wrong –… more »

…airplane passengers embracing the concept of N95 masks on children may actually rejoice at the idea of 6 hours with a screaming child because, well, peanuts are just that important to their quality of life and a brief peanut deprivation would quite simply be too devastating to even fathom. « less
June 28, 2010 12:14 pm

On a plane 2 years ago, when my son was 3, he came into contact the carpeting below the seat and developed hives. We looked and saw an old peanut under the seat in front of us. He has a documented peanut allergy. I suspect that there was residual peanut in the carpet that he came into contact with.

I am fairly certain that this 3 year-old boy he did not get hives because he was ‘stressed out’. Fortunately all he got was hives, but as best we could tell he did not have a serious ingestion (and our leg of the flight was peanut-free after we had notified the airline of his allergy at booking and check-in).

Please also see posts above citing the peer reviewed medical literature regarding the prevalence of food allergies, and specifically peanut allergies, in children.

So, while… more »

…it is possible to have an IgE-mediated reaction solely from emotional stress, this was not the case here.

Thank you. « less

June 23, 2010 5:51 pm

Thank you for your post. As a Medical professional, if you are aware of any studies or other medical information that is available, it would be useful to the DOT.

June 24, 2010 12:12 pm

Thank you for your detailed comment!

June 24, 2010 2:22 pm

Great comment. I am a parent of a multi-food allergy 6 year old. We are careful on what airlines we travel, we carry multiple epi-pens, we wipe down the seats before we let her sit down, etc… My order of preference for this question would be:

1. Ban Peanuts/Tree Nuts, most already don’t serve them and there are plenty of acceptable alternatives.
2. Ban on request if notified in advance.
3. Peanut free zones.

Peanuts/Tree Nuts are worse then other food allergens because they can be airborne which is why the recirculated air on airplanes is a problem. I am always nervous when are on a flight especially if we are going overseas

June 24, 2010 2:59 pm

This is exactly my point regarding emotional reasoning and also the idea that one individuals comfort is more important than anothers. in your zeal to ridicule you may have missed the point of alternatives and discussion which I thought was why we were here. perhaps I was wrong to thing that was what we were suppossed to be doing. Also, you assume the child will scream. I would say that perhaps you should help the child become accustomed to the mask before hand by making it a game. This has worked with other things that children must endure. Secondly you reject the notion outright and my guess is that you have never tried it. This also proves that your concern is more with what you want and not what might work. your reasoning backs us “the collective us” into a corner of take it… more »

…or leave it. I am sorry that offering other ideas instead of your preferred ban on peanuts upsets you. I refer you again to emotional reasoning on that.

« less

June 24, 2010 5:04 pm

dwein003 – The problem is when I pull out a Clif Bar to eat as a snack, or a PBJ sandwich I made at home, or a turkey sandwich on oatnut bread, or a snickers bar…Can I then not eat food that I packed to bring on board? Do I then need to change seats? This is where the holes in the plan becomes apparent. Eliminating bags of peanuts is not the issue – that’s easy. It’s how do you then deal with every potential peanut product passengers bring on board? Because to truly eliminate any potential for airborne peanut (for the moment, let’s ignore whether that poses a real risk or not), passengers would not be able to bring any food on-board, because even home-made sandwiches could contain nuts. And personally, I don’t think you can go that far. And so far on… more »

…this comment board, no one has been able to address that issue. So, what good is banning airlines from serving bags of peanuts if a passenger brings on a PBJ sandwich, or opens an energy bar that contains nuts? If we re-seat, who moves? The family of 4 with the allergy, or the family of 4 that wants to eat the food they brought on board? How do you easily move those folks around? Do you see how something that sounds so easy in sentence format becomes a nightmare when you actually try to implement it? « less
June 28, 2010 1:07 pm

As you say yourself, the child just got hives. This is not a dangerous reaction. So, what is the problem? Why are you so overprotective that you want to impact the entire traveling public due to this minor incident? I’ve had hives before, they are unpleasant. So is hunger.

July 6, 2010 9:37 am

There is no scientific evidence showing that peanut allergies are increasing. Self-reporting studies are inherently flawed and cannot be used for that very purpose. Uninformed parents think every adverse reaction to some food must be an allergy, and they don’t bother to have their children tested to find out.

Without there being a unified standard for allergy testing and diagnosis, any studies will be irrelevant and nothing more than a source of debate among the scientific community.


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