Dennis Prager was talking about this on his program last week. He said that he was unable to find even one instance of an actual event where a person died from eating a peanut, much less "eau de peanut." He claims that this is an "urban legend" and challenges anyone to provide a real instance of sudden peanut death, date, time, place and name of person involved.
It is NOT an urban legend. There is plenty of medical literature documenting this. Eating trace amounts of peanuts has caused many deaths, and breathing air containing peanut particles has caused anaphylactic shock, which is the precursor to all the deaths. Most of the time, an epi-pen is available and the victim doesn’t die, regardless of how the attack was triggered, but if there hasn’t already been an actual death just from breathing “peanut air”, it’s only a matter of time.
While quick use of an epi-pen is usually enough to prevent death, like most allergies, this one gets worse with each subsequent exposure. So it’s very important to prevent exposures, even if an epi-pen is handy, because another exposure can turn someone who would only go into anaphylactic shock from eating a peanut or two, into someone in whom the shock can be triggered by just breathing traces of peanuts.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11150011?ordinalpos=12&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2001 Jan;107(1):191-3. Links
Fatalities due to anaphylactic reactions to foods.Bock SA, Muñoz-Furlong A, Sampson HA.
Department of Pediatrics, National Jewish Medical and Research Center, Denver, CO, USA.
Fatal anaphylactic reactions to foods are continuing to occur, and better characterization might lead to better prevention. The objective of this report is to document the ongoing deaths and characterize these fatalities. We analyzed 32 fatal cases reported to a national registry, which was established by the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, with the assistance of the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, and for which adequate data could be collected. Data were collected from multiple sources including a structured questionnaire, which was used to determine the cause of death and associated factors. The 32 individuals could be divided into 2 groups. Group 1 had sufficient data to identify peanut as the responsible food in 14 (67%) and tree nuts in 7 (33%) of cases. In group 2 subjects, 6 (55%) of the fatalities were probably due to peanut, 3 (27%) to tree nuts, and the other 2 cases were probably due to milk and fish (1 [9%] each). The sexes were equally affected; most victims were adolescents or young adults, and all but 1 subject were known to have food allergy before the fatal event. In those subjects for whom data were available, all but 1 was known to have asthma, and most of these individuals did not have epinephrine available at the time of their fatal reaction. Fatalities due to ingestion of allergenic foods in susceptible individuals remain a major health problem. In this series, peanuts and tree nuts accounted for more than 90% of the fatalities. Improved education of the profession, allergic individuals, and the public will be necessary to stop these tragedies.
PMID: 11150011 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]