The Fear About Peanut Allergies Is Nuts

by Rahul K. Parikh, M.D. - February 5th, 2009 - Salon

Peanut-allergy panic has spread across the nation. In a recent essay, Harvard physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis relates an incident in which a peanut was spotted on the floor of a school bus, "whereupon the bus was evacuated and cleaned (I am tempted to say decontaminated), even though it was full of 10 year olds who, unlike 2 year olds, could actually be told not to eat off the floor."

Our nation has become a panic stricken nation because we actually have so little to panic about. I am reminded of the "greasy spoon" story about McDonald's. People used to simply accept that a certain number of people would die of food poisoning each year. The term was a common expression because the fear of death was not unreasonable. That changed when Ray Kroc built the McDonald's chain based on cleanliness. As competitor's copied the fetish, deaths dropped. Then bureaucrats in health departments tried to take credit for accomplishing the improvement, when in reality they had actually opposed McDonald restaurants as part of a general antipathy to fast food restaurants.

Today allergic deaths are extremely rare. To actually improve that percentage without huge effort would require some intelligent work. Or conversely someone can create a panic based on the minuscule odds of dying from an allergy and set the goal to make sure it never happens again by ... panic. Then we can spend huge sums of money and energy making sure something that almost no one is allergic to is banned from society because someone somewhere might be allergic!

Oh my God. There is a peanut on the floor! Run. Run for your life!