The Threat Is Real....

Over the weekend, Jane and I were lucky enough to experience a traveling project sponsored by Doctors Without Borders / Medecins Sans Frontieres, in which a makeshift refugee camp was set up in an urban public space for city residents to explore (via guided tour) and try to understand some of the harsh realities suffered by the estimated 42 million people around the world who have been forced from their homes and displaced. The exhibit / project is called A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City, and has journeyed throughout Canada and the West Coast before setting up in San Diego's Balboa Park. We received a 45-minute tour from a charming Kenyan woman who had recently worked at a Ugandan refugee camp.

The event was fascinating, but I'm afraid one thing I also took away from the day was a renewed skepticism for the supposed widespread threat of childhood food allergies plaguing the United States and, by extension, the world. Each station of the exhibit highlighted a specific problem faced in any refugee camp, be it locating clean water, monitoring malnutrition, building hygienic latrines, dodging landmines, dealing with cholera epidemics, or coping with emotional trauma. During the section discussing malnutrition, our guide handed around a small plastic ready-to-use food item called Plumpy'Nut, which was developed in 1999 by a French scientist and delivers much-needed protein, energy and a wide assortment of essential vitamins. It requires no cooking or preparation, keeps for 2 years before being opened, requires no refrigeration, and being a soft paste, it does not even require teeth for congestion. A month's worth of the food item for one child is $35. It is therefore considered to be literally a lifesaving device for children suffering from severe malnutrition, and has been adopted for famine relief after widespread success in Darfur and Niger.

However, Plumpy'Nut, as the name might suggest, contains peanut paste, along with vegetable oil, powdered milk and sugar. And at the mere mention of the dreaded peanut, several shocked members of the tour group asked our guide about food allergies and how such a product could be served to children. Our guide was equally shocked - by the question. She said, to her knowledge, there had never been any reactions or allergies in the camps. Her response seemed to be that peanut allergies were so incredibly rare as to barely enter into consideration.

No doubt, peanut and other food allergies do exist (I have a slight allergic reaction to nuts and avocados, which has manifested itself as a slight mouth tingle as long as I can remember). But I've also become convinced that the current food allergy hysteria is yet another example of the lethal combination of sensationalistic news media and well-placed advocacy groups. Meredith Broussard wrote a short article and spoke on NPR last January on the possible exaggerated threat of food allergies, for which she was severely attacked by both parents and groups such as the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN). Broussard notes that food allergies were of little concern to the majority of parents just a generation ago - I certainly don't remember hearing much about them - but are now considered to be a full-fledged childhood epidemic. She questions the data supplied by organizations such as FAAN, which has continually referred to a figure of 30,000 Americans sent to emergency rooms and 150 - 200 deaths each year from food allergies. Broussard notes that this figure was actually taken from a 1999 study of rural Minnesota, in which 133 individuals over five years suffered from some form of anaphylaxis - which could run the gamut from going into shock to simple itchy mouths (like my avocado reaction). The Centers for Disease Control, on the other hand, has listed a mere 12 recorded food allergy-related deaths in 2004.

The knee-jerk reaction from some of the people on our tour to Plumpy'Nut reminded me of the pure hysteria that resulted a few years ago from the sloppy and sensationalistic reporting of the so-called "kiss of death" - when a teenaged girl supposedly died from a peanut allergy after kissing her boyfriend. The boy had apparently eaten a peanut-butter sandwich earlier in the day. I try not to follow mainstream American news coverage to avoid just these kinds of non-news stories, but this one was impossible to avoid, as the international media picked up on it as well. The death was held up as a major indicator of the rampant danger of the food allergy epidemic. Five months after the death and subsequent panic, however, the coroner determined the girl had actually smoked pot earlier in the day and died from an asthma attack. I don't recall much follow-up from the media when this news was announced.

I don't mean to deny the reality of food allergies - they clearly exist, and pose a threat. But when fear and anxiety of an unproven epidemic have so spread throughout a society that people in a tour of refugee camps move swiftly past concerns of cholera, malnutrition, dysentery, measles, trauma, clean water, land mines and war violence to ask about peanut allergies - well, I for one have to agree with Broussard's clever title for her original piece; "Everyone's Gone Nuts".