I wonder the same thing. I’m 66 and don’t ever recall hearing abou this until maybe 20 years ago. Of course, the internet took off 20 years ago and now we get highly local stories like this all the time. Has it always been with us? Is it something new? What changed?
I was thinking the same thing, as a child I never heard of people dying from these allergic reactions. Me, and all my friends, ate basically anything we were given at my house or their house and the idea of being careful of allergies was never brought up.
Even as an adult in the military in the 70’s and 80’s I cannot remember anyone having these kind of major reactions.
Yes people used to say that they “choked” on the peanuts, or they just choked and no mention of peanuts.
Yeah. I think a lot of “scientific studies” are just boondoggles, but I would really like to see researchers pin down why peanut allergies became a big deal. When I was a kid, peanut butter was a primary food choice for virtually every kid in school. No one died. No one “had a reaction”.
Today, we take extreme precautions, and still it’s not enough: kids die.
What changed?
Some people “always” died from peanut allergy. One reason there is more incidence now is that allergic people are more likely to live through their episodes and pass on their genes. Another reason is that peanuts are found in many more foods than previously. There were probably “always” many people allergic to peanuts (or other nuts), but they never encountered the food so it didn’t matter.
When I was going through elementary school during the 1970s, most of us brought peanut butter sandwiches to school (I didn't have a school cafeteria until high school). We would have laughed then at anybody who said they were allergic to peanuts.
Then when I was sending my children through school, I would constantly get notices from the school warning me against having my children bring any peanut products into the school. So something definitely changed. Could it be the genetics in the peanuts we are growing?
The only peanut sanctuary left is the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain, which not only puts a pail of peanuts on every table but has a waiting area with a huge barrel of peanuts and which patrons are encouraged to throw the peanut shells to the floor.
I'm amazed that this chain hasn't come under attack yet from the peanut-nazi crowd. Until they do, it's one of my favorite places to eat out because I love peanuts. I could eat them all day long.
A Scout from the troop I used to be associated with had what he said was a severe sesame allergy, but he didn't take it seriously. Careful questioning on his family history led to the detail that his father's brother had died young - "choked on a Big Mac". After I pointed out the ingredients on a Big Mac, he finally started taking his allergy seriously. The bottom line? They used to die.
Okay, that's only part of the story. The other part is that modern hybrid peanuts deliver a larger dose of the key allergens. We cook in peanut oil more than we used to, modern peanuts contain a larger dose of the allergens, and then the kids survive because of epipens. Finally, we're correctly diagnosing what happened more often. Combine all those facts, and it looks like we have more of these problems (and we do because those kids usually don't die young of their allergies).
"Peanut allergies are rising among American children and one reason might be due to economic status. According to a new study presented at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) Annual Scientific Meeting, greater rates of peanut allergy are found in families with higher economic status. This supports the "hygiene hypothesis" of many allergists." -- Socioeconomic Status Linked To Childhood Peanut Allergy, 2012, American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology.Allergists are suspecting the huge growth in antibacterial soap as a root cause.
"The reason for the link between antibacterial soaps and allergies has to do with the hygiene hypothesis, a theory about how the immune system develops and reacts to assaults. Some scientists believe that our society’s current obsession with cleanliness — both in the form of overuse of antibacterial cleaning products, as well as an exceedingly sanitized lifestyle that keeps us isolated from most sources of germs that can make us ill — has caused our immune systems to become hypersensitive to foreign assaults of all kinds, whether harmful or beneficial." -- Can Overuse of Antibacterial Soap Promote Allergies in Kids?, 2010, Time.
i tell my kids this all the time. I am 62- from grade K-12, i knew 4 sick kids. 1 diabetic, 1 bee allergy, 1 with an enlarged head,( shut up.), 1 developmentally slow, formerly known as retarded. That’s it.
Now everybody’s kid has something wrong. Even my golden retriever has allergies!!! what the hell happened?
“Did some people “always” used to die from peanuts, and we’re just lately understanding the cause, or is this some relatively new phenomenon? “
I suspect if you look at deaths and actuarial statistics, nothing much has changed in the last, say, fifty years. I chose fifty years because, in 1965 there were practically no vending machines. My recollection is there were darned few fat people and obese people were even rarer. So, the likelihood prior to then was if you ate a snack, it was homemade and, therefore, made with your dietary situation taken into account. But since the advent of a huge market for snacks that can be made on the same machines as those used to produce other, peanut containing snacks, probably the death stats went up.
Another change that is relatively recent is the democratization of “news” meaning more people are reporting the “news” on a wider array of platforms than the three main networks, which only had to fill three half-hour shows per day. Those shows would be dominated by what we’d call hard core news, public meetings, air crashes, disasters, a serial rapist, etc. How many times on FR have we recently read a headline where so-and-so, an unknown person to the wider public, called Trump a doody-head? What constitutes news has changed along with the need to fill 24/7 content channels with clickable content. So, things that would never have made the “news” even a few years ago are shown next to video’s of Islamic terrorists beheading people.
A person with a deadly allergy should view everything they put into their mouths as if it was a loaded gun they were putting to their head. But, today, nobody is held responsible for themselves or their safety. When I was a kid and I had to cross the street to get to the school bus, you can bet I looked both ways and waited until it was safe. Today, the buss puts on its flashers and, here’s the danger we impose on our children, the kids run across the street without even a glance to see if the traffic has indeed stopped.
I hate to blame the victim, but if I had an allergy serious enough to kill me, I’d never put anything in my mouth without thoroughly investigating whether it was safe. As it is, my mom sent me out of the house with anything I’d need that day. She was, in retrospect, the most thoughtful and best parent a kid could have had.
With no empirical evidence...only anecdotal...I believe it is a recent phenomenon brought about by several generations of children not being allowed to play in the dirt. Some kids do not get exposed to certain microbes that allow the body to develop immunity to them. Microbes that exist in the exact same environment where peanuts grow.
I grew up in peanut country. I never heard of a peanut death, not even an allergy. In the early Fall, when peanuts were plowed up, dust would be in the air, causing a haze like condition. I guess that de-sensitived all of us.
I grew up in peanut country and we never had anyone die from them. Most farmers grew peanuts and teens would help with the harvest. Peanut harvests are a dusty job. The wind spread it and it was tracked all over town. Everyone had peanut dust on them. Then the dried plants are fed to livestock so more human interaction. The 1970s were the days of free government peanut butter. Peanut butter (and real butter and cheese) was given out to low income families and the leftover supply was given to anyone who wanted it. Our school lunch trays had some form of peanut butter on them every day - homemade cookies, peanut butter with honey for hot yeast rolls, a dollop for apple slices or a dixie cup full. No child ever dropped dead at their lunch table.
Doctors today are saying parents are causing kids to develop severe allergies by not giving pb or such to them as babies. Doctors are advising babies get little bits of pb. Peanuts haven’t changed, people have.
I may be opening a can of worms here but the reason I think we are hearing about this is Darwinism in reverse. More people who would have died early in the life in a earlier time, are surviving to pass on their genetic makeup.
Life was tough back before we have clean, potable water, a working sewage systems and antibiotics. Even healthy people could go to bed healthy and in the morning have a disease that would kill them by nightfall.
Life goes on.
The Hygiene Hypothesis is basically the idea that we keep our houses and environment too clean, and therefore don’t give our immune systems something worthy to work on. So the immune system turns on itself, and creates the peanut protein, for example, to be the problem.