From Pine View Farm

Nutcase II: Good Old Days Dept. 2

One difference today from when I was a young ‘un is that a much higher percentage of parents seems to be paranoid nutcases about their kids’ health. I say, if they wanna eat dirt, let ’em eat dirt. It’ll make ’em healthy.

El Reg:

A Harvard professor of medical sociology has agreeably warned that increasing hysteria over nut allergies in kids bears the hallmarks of mass psychogenic illness (MPI) – described as “a social network phenomenon involving otherwise healthy people in a cascade of anxiety”.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, Nicholas A Christakis cites the extreme example of when a potentially fatal 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 two-year-olds, could actually be told not to eat food off the floor”.

(snip)

The facts are these, Christakis insists: “About 3.3 million Americans are allergic to nuts, and even more – 6.9 million – are allergic to seafood. However, all told, serious allergic reactions to foods cause just 2,000 hospitalisations a year (out of more than 30 million hospitalisations nationwide). And only 150 people (children and adults) die each year from all food allergies combined.”

These folks are gonna end up raising a generation of cotton balls.

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2 comments

  1. Karen

    December 10, 2008 at 2:20 pm

    Cotton balls that have to be kept in plastic bubbles, you mean.

     
  2. Frank

    December 10, 2008 at 4:10 pm

    Pretty much. That’s so them cotton balls don’t get rotten.