A Harvard Medical School Professor believes some measures to protect children from food allergies are becoming increasingly absurd and even hysterical.
Prof
Nicholas Christakis has published a commentary in the
British Medical Journal about the rise in "nut hysteria" with parents becoming over-anxious about exposure to peanuts and other nuts.
He told the BBC there had been "a gross over-reaction to the magnitude of the threat" posed by food allergies, and in particular nut allergies.
For example, a peanut left on the floor of a Massachusetts school bus had led to the evacuation of the bus and its cleaning (Prof Christakis said he was tempted to use "decontaminated") for fear it might have affected the 10-year-old passengers.
"School entrances have signs admonishing visitors to wash their hands before entry to avoid (nut) contamination," he said.
He said these responses were extreme and had many of the hallmarks of mass psychogenic illness (MPI), previously known as epidemic hysteria.
Prof Christakis said well-intentioned efforts to reduce exposure to nuts had actually fanned the flames, signalling to parents nuts were a "clear and present danger".
"This encourages more parents to worry, which fuels the epidemic. It also encourages more parents to have their children tested, thus detecting mild and meaningless allergies," he said.
He said there were 150 deaths from food allergy-related causes in the United States each year. In comparison, 100 people were killed from lightning strikes, 1300 in gun accidents and 45,000 in car crashes.Quoted in the Daily Mail newspaper, Allergy UK Clinical Director
John Collard supported Prof Christakis' views.
He said people in Britain were also over-reacting to their response to food allergies and the risk had been blown out of all proportion.
Britain records about 10 deaths per year from all food allergies.
"I heard a similar story in the UK about a school making children wear gowns over their clothing during meal times so there would be no contamination fear from milk," Mr Collard said.
"There is a tendency to go over the top. Food allergies can be deadly and every death is clearly a tragedy so we need to do what we can to prevent them. But you have to balance that against the impact on the quality of life of everyone else. This risk has been blown out of all proportion."
