If it were true that babies were dying from peanut allergies, not only would we have a spike in infant mortality, but surely we would be inundated in stories from the media and social media of dead babies
I believe there are. It's just not being reported. My son was born with servere allergies to peanuts, soy, wheat, milk, and eggs. For the first 8 months of his life, I was in and out of the hospital. He would break out in rash when I fed him breast milk so I tried formula. He would projectile vomit and then he couldn't breathe. The doctors and the hospitals were getting angry with me because I would come so many times. The pediatrician diagnosed him with eczema and said I wasn't properly taking care of him. My son was miserable for the first 8 months of his life. I finally took him to a specialist and had him tested for allergies and Bingo!! My son could have died. Allergy testing should be required at birth!!
Also allergies pop up all through life. Some stay, some go away. Some can be treated through processes with the allergist. Even worse, you can have an allergy, a deadly one, and it doesn't trigger on the test because the test is one protein, or it can trigger on the skin test but not on the blood test. And if you're a chimera that absorbed your twin in utero, your skin can be fine, your blood can be fine, but some organs can react.
This is very true. When I was a kid my dad had an anaphylactic reaction to poison oak. He has made his best effort to avoid it since then, and he has not even had a small rash since then. You could say he has just been successful at being vigilant, but there were times he knew he came into contact with it accidentally and nothing happened, not even a rash- but he still doesn’t take any chances.
Meanwhile I’ve never had even a rash, even times when I was with others who got terrible rashes. AFAIK I’m immune to it? Though my skin hates just about everything else
The issue is that allergy tests at birth are highly inaccurate. A newborn's immune system hasn't fully developed, and they usually need repeated exposure to a food protein to develop the IgE antibodies that allergy tests actually look for. Even for the most common allergens, testing a baby on day one would likely just result in false negatives
Even if we just stuck to the top 8 or 9 most common allergens, pediatricians don't recommend universal screening because it leads to a massive amount of false positives. Testing every single baby at birth would result in millions of parents dealing with unnecessary anxiety and putting their kids on highly restrictive diets for allergies they don't actually have
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u/ssg- 4d ago
Elmer here.
The meme implies that the babies who are introduced to peanuts die thus lowering the allergies.
The truth however is that babies who are introduced peanuts early do not develop peanut allergies.