Certain instances prove that Americans are going crazy with the mere mention of a nut. An elementary school seizing student's lunchboxes to look for any nuts; and forcing everyone to scrub hands before entering school premises to cutting down high-grown trees around the house to stay away from allergies that the hickory nuts may bring along, are a few to mention.
Harvard professor Dr. Nicholas Christakis worked for an observation study on paranoia associated with nuts, which is published in the British Medical Journal.
He was motivated to work on this study recently, when a school bus was evacuated after someone found a stray peanut on the bus. His son was amongst the students occupying the Massachusetts-school bus.
Statistics from Christakis reveals that approximately 3.3 million Americans have serious nut allergies and around 150 people die every year due to similar conditions. "My interest is in understanding (the reaction to nut allergies) as a spread of anxiety," he commented.
Christakis believes that fear and panic result in more damage than the condition itself. Considering that every year driving and gun-firing kills 45,000 and 1300 people respectively, nut allergy figures should not raise a social hysteria.
Food allergies among children under 18 years of age has increased about 17 percent, according to Centers for Disease Control(CDC) statistics from 1997 to 2007.
Some experts are thinking that immunity level of children has dropped due to excessive hygienic lifestyles, but others feel that increased percentage reflects patients, who are requesting diagnosis for nut allergies and also the actual number of allergy-cases.
Christakis warned, "You have to distinguish between an epidemic of diagnoses and an epidemic of allergies."
According to him, ""There are kids with severe allergies and they need to be taken seriously but the problem with a disproportionate response is that it feeds the epidemic." He commented that demonized illustration of nuts just intensifies the panic wave amongst people.
He stressed on the fact that creating nut-free zones and schools may prove even more harmful to the already dipping immunity amongst children these days, making them susceptible to nut allergies.
Christakis fortified his point that early exposure to nuts cuts down the risk of catching allergies later in life by citing examples from U.K. and Israel.
Peanuts are not a regular part of a typical U.K. diet and hence two percent children contract nut allergies in their lifespan. Israelis include peanuts in diet on routine basis right from the infant stage and figures show that just about 0.17 percent of children are allergic to nuts.
However, Pediatric Allergy and Immunologydefine department chief from Johns Hopkins Children's Center, Dr. Robert Wood, said, "The reality is that the vast majority of kids - 95% plus - have no potential to get peanut allergies no matter what you do," he says, "and there's one-half to 1 percent who are going to get it no matter what you do."
"I think that having peanut-free preschools is a totally reasonable, justifiable thing to do," added Dr. Wood.
But he agrees with Christakis statement that over-concerned individuals are striking panic. "It's an unfortunate situation, if a family with an inaccurate perception of the allergy leads a child to believe that a Snickers bar from 50 feet away is a lethal weapon," lamented Wood.
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