OK, and I admit, some months ago when I first encountered threads of this nature, I was in disbelief about a product that I've always considered safe. Then, I found myself dealing with it in an angry manner, and suggested that the susceptible kids be cocooned in a special school. Now, I read the posts in this thread, and I'm starting to understand and empathize a bit more.
Still, what proportion of kids being severely allergic (you can define that as at near risk of dying, or worse) does there have to be, before we just go ahead and ban peanuts? One in ten, yes, I'd tend to be in favor of it. One in a million, I'm not.
BTW, how do you think a child would feel if they brought a PB&J to school and it caused another child to go into shock, possibly die?
Horrible, of course. But I'd expect that same kid to feel equally as bad if he came to school with a cold or flu that another child caught, and, in a freak occurrence, died from. In the latter case, we'd certainly want to counsel the child who carried the illness that it was not their fault, that things happen. Why wouldn't we do the same thing with the PB&J incident? If there was no overt threatening involved (and its not too clear to me that in the present case what the threatening behavior was), then I'd have to assign it to the "stuff happens" category.
Clearly, we'd all rid ourselves of cold and flu germs, if possible, they do no one any good. But peanuts are a food substance that does no harm to the great majority of people. In my mind, it takes a higher threshold of harm to ban peanuts, but its not an insurmountable threshold. What should that line be?