Nuts

[phl666]

Are nut allergies a relatively new phenomenon?

I don't recall nuts being an issue at all until quite recently. I am talking about things like food labels, restaurant menus - even a permission slip from my child's school to engage in cookery activities.

I certainly don't recall anyone having such an allergy when I was at school (in the 1970s).

[stoo_pid]

I wouldn't say its a recent thing but we know much more about it now.  I had a friend who died 20 years ago after eating a curry which turned out to have some kind of nuts in the ingredients.  She already suspected she had some kind of allergy as she'd had minor reactions to some nuts before.  But we didn't know how dangerous her allergy could be, so sadly she wasn't as careful about checking ingredients as people are now.

 

[nicola_red]

My mum has had the allergy her whole life, but we only started hearing about it in the news relatively recently.  She's equally allergic to currants, raisins etc and also Pernod, but that still seems to be quite rare.

[Frankie Babe]

wish I'd been allergic to Pernod when I was younger! :-)

[libertie]

Some research that was done a year or so ago claimed that a possible cause for the increase in nut allergy sufferers was a cream that nursing mothers used to clean their n*pp***. As far as I can remember the suspect ingredient in the cream was then changed, and the product is still available.

[molly malone]

This reminded me of when we were on on way home from holiday this year.  The stewardess made an announcement that as there was a passenger with a nut allergy, they would not be selling peanuts with drinks.  What i couldn't understand was how could other people eating them have an affect on the person with the allergy.

[splange]

Recent research found that quite a few people with nut allergies suffered from bad excema as a child and the ointments prescribed in combating the excema had a huge peanut oil content, overloading the system with it and triggering said allergy.

[aurelia]

I think the people who suffered from that allergy 30 years ago were unheard of unless you knew someone - I know I never met anyone who had it until I started working in schools and had to give a child an epipen which has adrenalin in it - some people are more allergic than others.  It is so bad in schools I have worked in that no children are allowed nuts even if parents have okayed it - I have had to get a child to take their play piece home and given them something else.  Some people get anaphalactic shock from just breathing dust from peanuts in the atmosphere.  A couple of years ago an aeroplane had to guarantee that no customer would have peanuts on them and no memeber of staff and that nobody had eaten peanuts for 24 hours because of this persions exrreme allergy - it was on the news