[ichabod1]

Then what changed in 1998? Your argument is weak and unsupported. No latin there.

[aruanan]

This epidemic tipped into critical mass around 1998 when the first flood of allergic children entered kindergarten sending a shock through education systems. Prevalence of the allergy increases with parental income, education and accessible health care. It does not increase with consumption. In developing countries where peanut consumption is high, the allergy is virtually unknown. In the west, children who have never eaten a peanut experience reactions on initial exposure to the food.

First, the "epidemic tipped into a critical mass around 1998" is probably more of a journalistic artifact than an epidemiological event. The most important part of the above excerpt is that the prevalence increases with higher standards of living which also happen to have lower levels of exposure to all sorts of antigens than would have been characteristic of the childhood of the parents of these children. Kids that have had a large load and wide range of exposures to lots of different substances during childhood are much less likely to develop allergies or asthma.

Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but it's also a lot closer to allergies.