I speak as someone whose allergist is on speed dial. I have a life-threatening allergy, and have to carry an Epipen everywhere I go. I will take an antihistamine everyday for the rest of my life and will use Advair or its equivalent for just as long. I break out in hives almost daily, carry steroid cream in my purse, and am always itchy. I wheeze, cough, and sniffle constantly because my allergies have given me allergic asthma. My eyes are always bloodshot and I have allergic shiners you would not believe. Also, I could literally die just from walking into a room.

What am I so allergic to? Dust. Try avoiding that.

It's easy to say that not every allergic reaction will be a life-threatening one, and this is true. However, let me say that it is not fun to have continuous small reactions. It truly hurts your quality of life. It is difficult to concentrate when a part of your body is covered in breathtakingly itchy welts. It is hard to have a social life when someone's house might send you into an asthma attack or worse because they didn't dust this week --or they had peanut butter cookies after dinner. It is hard to go shopping or on vacation because you don't know if the environment will be hostile to you. You try not to worry constantly because stress makes you more susceptible to allergies, but if you relax your guard too much you put yourself at risk. It is a fine line and you are always walking it. And you always will.

Do I ask the world to change for me or others who have life-threatening allergies? No, but when there is a reasonable opportunity to mitigate true risk to a person's health, it should be taken.

Evacuating the school bus, though? That's just fucked up.

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I was the only kid in my school to have it, back in the mid-80s, and although I didn't die, I did spend an unwarrantable amount of time in the girls room vomiting thanks to all the pb&j sandwiches the other kids routinely had for lunch.

It would have been nice not to have had that experience.

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a) We can agree that helicopter parenting & obsessive protectiveness= bad. That said...

b) ...exposure to free play, fresh air, and germs is NOT the same as exposing kids to foods that they are deathly allergic to. The former makes them tougher, the latter could kill them.

c) Sure, parents of kids with allergies can't dictate what the entire world does, the fact that potentially fatal allergies are now common here in North America means that reasonable measures should be taken here. Like it or not, nuts are effectively a biohazard for a lot of people. It's a little ignorant to be like: "Oh boohoo, I'm standing up for my god-given right to eat nuts in school, you wussies."

d) It may be over-cleanliness in developed countries that cause these allergies, but THAT'S IRRELEVANT TO PEOPLE WHO ALREADY HAVE THEM. "Sucking it up" is not going to prevent my sister from choking to death if she ingests a trace of your PBJ.
Let's separate "prevention of more allergies" from "being callous about existing allergies."

My parents were anything but over-protective but my sister developed nut allergies anyway. In fact, my mother's ignorance nearly killed her. Mom (immigrant from a huge Asian city where these allergies are unheard of) fed little sis an almond cake just weeks after she was diagnosed with the allergy, reasoning that "the actual almonds were on the other side of the cake!" Cue my sister's first near-death experience.

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Hence, the family doesn't eat out often.

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I already am preparing for the fights I will have to have with his future schools over his right to have an education free from the risk of death. I live in fear of the day I will have to jab the epipen in his leg and rush him to the hospital hoping he doesn't stop breathing and DIE because some kid's mom thinks her kids right to a pb&j for lunch trumps my kid's right to live.

We've already had three close calls, all from accidental exposure to minute amounts of peanut crap, once just from touching a fraction of a peanut shell he found on the seat in an airport waiting area. So yeah,even at school,someone wiping their hands on a table or desk after eating peanut products can leave proteins on the table that can KILL my kid. It doesn't even have to be limited to the lunch room. Call me over reactive, but I struggled with 3 years of infertility to bring him into this world, I sure as hell will fight to ban the damn peanuts from his school to keep him alive. Besides,he is cute...who wouldn't want to protect the cute????

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Honestly. Does everyone here who's snorting derisively understand that some kids with peanut allergies DIE? Even if it's just one tiny speck? My younger son's preschool doesn't serve peanut products. And you know what? Instead of thinking my little pwecious's right to peanuts were being violated because everyone is just being so unreasonable and overreacting, I understood it, because lives could be at risk. It's not that hard to understand.

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But if we use the term "allergy," people get really, really nervous, and we know one of those kids who could actually, you know, die, so we try to be respectful of everybody's fears. So, seconding purpleshoes here.

I think that here again, we reach the conclusion that people need to be reasonable. Not to instill mindless fear, but to instill mindful reason. Reasonable-ness has really lost its cache! And that is too bad.

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Part of the problem with allergies appears to be the low levels of peanut products in our foods. Our bodies see the small amounts of these foreign proteins as invaders. Peanut allergies are rare in cultures where they are eaten often- my house included...PB on crackers, apples, sandwiches, bagels, in our granola... I am getting hungry.

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Bahahahahahaha...grade school nuts humor, I still haz it.

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I'm sure from an epidemiological standpoint, there are other places we could be directing our time and resources that could benefit more children, but I'm also not sure it's that ridiculously harder to substitute a sandwich filling and give your non-allergic kids their nuts at home.

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