Posted on 07/18/2018 5:26:29 AM PDT by SMGFan
WESTON, Florida -- A Florida mother blames the death of her 15-year-old daughter on what she calls confusing packaging for Reese's Chips Ahoy cookies.
In a July 12 Facebook post, Kellie Travers-Stafford wrote that her daughter Alexi mistakenly ate one of the cookies at a friend's house despite her peanut allergy, because the top of the familiar red packaging was peeled back, hiding the Reese's label.
She says Alexi felt tingling in her mouth on June 25 and they administered two Epipens but Alexi quickly went into anaphylactic shock, stopped breathing and died within an hour and a half of eating the cookie.
"As a mother who diligently taught her the ropes of what was okay to ingest and what was not, I feel lost and angry because she knew her limits and was aware of familiar packaging, she knew what "safe" was," Travers-Stafford said in the post. "A small added indication on the pulled back flap on a familiar red package wasn't enough to call out to her that there was "peanut product" in the cookies before it was too late."
Travers-Stafford, who lives in Weston, which is near Fort Lauderdale, said she is sharing Alexi's story to "spread awareness."
(Excerpt) Read more at abc7ny.com ...
That’s because we were exposed to everything. A family friend was born allergic to milk. All her life, she has been exposed by her parents to small amounts of dairy so she could build up a tolerance.
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).
Actually, it's Nabisco, with a Hershey product added, instead of just chocolate chips.
"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.
Five Guys burgers also has roasted and salted peanuts in the shell for you to snack on while you wait.
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?
if she had a peanut allergy she never should eat packaged cookies.
Peanut butter cookies contains peanuts.
Situational awareness is vital in todays world.
“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.
Really? I’ll have to check Five Guys out then. I see them everywhere but have never been inside one.
Our medical and food industry has been in ka-hoots for decades. They have us right where they want us!
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.
When I got out of the service, and headed back home, I suddenly developed allergies to things that had never bothered me in the past. I mowed my dad's lawn for him when I first got out, and 15 minutes in I couldn't see, was sneezing all over the place, and my mouth itched like crazy. That blew me away, as I mowed lawns for spending money starting when I was 10. I don't appear to have any life-threatening food allergies, but I do notice some things seem to affect me differently than others.
It’s not the friend’s parents’ responsibility to clear their house of peanuts. If the kid is as allergic as all that, simply having had peanut butter out for breakfast could have made the kitchen, at least, poisonous to her.
A terrible thing, but by 15 the kid should know not to eat any packaged goods like that. At very least not without carefully scouring the complete ingredients list, if it had been produced in a peanut-free factory, etc. Heck, she’d be better off in health anyway, if she just avoided processed foods altogether.
There’s this infamous peanut story.......the young girl was an athlete.....with a peanut allergy.
She had a bowl of the famous chili at a restaurant....no one associates chili with peanuts.
However the chef had a secret ingredient....peanut butter to thicken the chili.
The girl did get all the symptoms but b/c she had not eaten peanuts, she ignored them......and died.
The respectful thing was to stop bringing PB&J's. No problem. I've no idea how he - and others like him - live. Always figured that you actually would need to ingest the product to have a reaction. Sounds like girl in this story had much the same level of difficulty.
However, I'm not as sympathetic towards helicopter Moms with a Munchausen complex who insist that their children have severe peanut allergies because the kid sneezed once near the peanut section at a grocery store. They exist too, unfortunately, and trivialize the problem for those who have serious difficulties.
i don’t know if u are correct but something changed.
“the top of the familiar red packaging was peeled back”
The cookie manufacturer didn’t peel it back, lady.
I think that if she was deathly allergic to peanuts, she would have/should have been in a routine to read all ingredients on any packaged food that she was considering eating.
It does not seem to me like this is the fault of her friend’s family nor that of Reese’s Chips Ahoy cookies.
Sad, but sometimes there really is no one to sue. JMHO
This is similar to gun safety. You always assume the gun is loaded.
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