Peanut Ban in Schools 🚫🥜🏫💉

Matan1 -“What is inherently dangerous about sports?”

Even if you play close to 100% well, like the professional sports players, many get hurt!
Now take kids, which are just learning, there’s a much greater chance of injury. Some of the injured will be permanent or end in death.
Now if you believe in banning peanuts, for sure you should believe in banning sports!

Peanuts are an affordable nutritious food. The financial burden that comes along with not using peanuts is very significant.

Matan1 -“Injuries, sure, but death?”

Of course death! Stop with your manipulation!
From the Daily News 2013 – And this is just football:
“Each year in the U.S. an average of a dozen high school and college football players die during practices and games, according to a new study that finds heart conditions, heat and other non-traumatic causes of death are twice as common as injury-related ones.
Researchers reviewed data from the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research and found 243 football deaths recorded between July 1990 and June 2010.
One hundred of the fatalities resulted from an underlying heart condition, 62 were due to a brain injury – typically a subdural hematoma – and 38 were from heat-related causes, according to findings published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine.”

know of any?

I am fairly certain that there is no correlation between peanut allergies and sport injuries.

There might be an analogy, but not a correlation.

Matan1 -“How many yeshivos do you know where kids are playing tackle football?”

Another manipulation from you! Football was just an example.
If we ban peanuts – we should certainly ban Sports!
From VIN:
“Long Branch, NJ – A fifth grader the son of a Lakewood, NJ, Yeshiva principal was killed after a baseball hit his throat on Friday afternoon.”

When did I manipulate anything? You cited an article about football, and I responded by asking how many yeshiva students play tackle football.

You brought football into this conversation, and I responded. No manipulation.

I rarely post here, but after watching this thread for the past few days, I feel a need to share our story.

My teenage daughter has a severe allergy to peanuts. When she entered gan, I did not request that peanuts be banned from the gan. I just asked the gananot to be scrupulous about hand washing for those girls who brought peanut butter. It worked…until it didn’t. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, but one day right after they ate, the girls were playing in the yard and the ganenet noticed that my daughter was covered with hives. That quickly progressed to facial and tongue swelling and difficulty breathing. She was given an EpiPen and after 3 days in the hospital, she was fine. She went back to gan, but the ganenet insisted on a peanut ban after that. I hated drawing attention to her allergy, but I understood that the ganenet did not want to experience that again.

Fast forward to starting kitah aleph. I specifically told the principal that I did not see a need for a peanut ban in the whole school, but I suggested that perhaps her classroom could be a peanut-free zone and that if there were girls in the class who wanted to eat peanut butter, maybe they could go eat in the parallel classroom that day. She agreed to that and we got through almost 3 years of school with no incidents. Then, toward the end of 3rd grade, my daughter walked into the bathroom where another girl was washing her hands after eating peanut butter. My daughter could smell and feel the peanut butter as soon as she entered the room, so she walked out right away, but it was too late. She felt her throat swell and could not swallow or breathe, and her EpiPen was back in her classroom. She passed out before making it back to her classroom, and by the time someone noticed her, she was in serious distress. BH her teacher was quick and she ran to her with her EpiPen and injected it on the spot and saved her life. She spent 2 weeks in the hospital recovering and this time, I was the one who requested that the school ban peanuts. The principal wholeheartedly agreed and said she had intended to do that even without me asking.

That’s our story. You decide if peanut bans are necessary.

Syag Lchochma,

She was 8 years old at the time and was not yet self-injecting so having her EpiPen on her would not have solved the problem. (She started self-injecting at 12.) We did insist that her EpiPen be in her classroom and not in the office, and whenever they went to another classroom or to the yard, she did have it in a waistpack, but she was allowed to go to the bathroom (right across the hall) without it and that is not what caused this to happen. The fact was that she was alone and nobody saw her at the time she reacted. Yes, I did write in my previous post that her EpiPen was back in her classroom as if it was an important factor in the story, but it really wasn’t since having it on her when she can’t use it wouldn’t have helped. As soon as her teacher was notified, she came running with the EpiPen so no time was wasted.

I’m not so sure “trying it the other way” is a wise choice because there are unfortunately times that there’s no second chance.

There have been plenty of incidents of peanut traces even in places where peanuts are banned.

Matan1 -“Or they could add throat guards to all players.”

So instute in your kids’ school everyone should wear throat guards! Let’s see if anyone complies!

You missed my whole point , (IDK if on purpose or not), there are things like sports, that people do on a regular basis, you should take every precaution, not just banning it!
The same thing with peanuts, the schools shouldn’t just take the attitude of banning. They should look for solutions, eg. all kids should only eat in a lunch room & make sure everyone cleans off afterwards.
The allergic kids should eat in their classroom.

Why take measures to protect allergic children when the general policy is to be careless with all children?

Homeschool all allergic children.

I did not read every post here, but I found this Interesting Letter posted on the AAAAI (America Academy of Allergy Asthma & Immunology) website.

8/27/2013
As a pediatrician and mother of a child with peanut allergy, I have a million questions/concerns as I battle to keep my daughter safe from accidental peanut exposure. Why do allergists not recommend banning peanuts from schools? Being that the mainstay of treatment is avoidance and having epinephrine, it seems to me it is impossible to avoid peanut in our public elementary school environments. I have read that the likelihood of outgrowing peanut allergy is greatest before age 8, so the early elementary years are CRITICAL for peanut allergic children if we are to maximize their chances of outgrowing this allergy.

In my opinion, Allergists are contradicting themselves by recommending strict avoidance but not peanut bans in schools. Allergists claim that banning peanuts would give a false sense of security. I strongly disagree with this reasoning. Young kindergarteners should not be made exclusively responsible for their well-being. They are not mature enough to know where hidden peanut may lay or to keep their hands away from their mouths/faces. I believe it is UNSAFE to throw our tiny kids into peanut butter jars, which is what our schools are, and expect them not to be exposed. No wonder so few kids (15-20%) outgrow their peanut allergy. Where is the evidence-based medicine that proves that banning peanuts from school is not helpful for avoidance? I haven’t found it. I know there will be parents who will not comply with the peanut ban, but most will. Reducing the peanut content in our kids’ environment will still be better than having a huge amount of peanut all over the schools. Peanut bans would not mean letting our guards down, we would still have epis, etc.

I strongly urge the AAAI to reconsider their peanut management recommendations, because the current ones do us a disservice. I am entering discussions with my schools administrators to seek a peanut ban and am having a very tough battle with them. The reason I seek a ban is because their current policies do not work. They do not ENFORCE a peanut-free zone in the classrooms. Posting a sign on the door does no good if parents are still allowed to pack peanut-containing products. No one checks snacks/lunches to ensure compliance. I refuse to accept the current lax policies and will not throw my child into the lions to fend for herself at age 5. If age 5 is considered mature for peanut self-management, then why don’t we teach sex education in kindergarten? Thus, we could start preparing them for the real world as early as possible. That’s ridiculous, right? That’s how I see the attempts to prepare a child for age 5 to manage her peanut allergy. There will be plenty of time to do that later when she is more capable to make decisions. My main concern at age 5 is to keep avoiding peanuts/treenuts strictly so she may have a chance to outgrow it! If she keeps being exposed to peanuts in school, her antibody levels may rise with each reaction and she would never outgrow it. I strongly urge the AAAI and all allergists to consider your stance on this recommendation. Having your strong support in favor of peanut bans would help families seeking strict avoidance if peanut in all environments, home and school. Thank you.

A:
Thank you for your letter.

I clearly understand your position, and from reading your e-mail, I also feel that you have become familiar with the position of experts in this field who have not advised the banning of peanuts. Some of the opinions you expressed make me realize that you are already aware of the rationales that have been employed to justify the opinion that banning peanuts in schools would be inadvisable. This is an issue which has been debated almost endlessly, and there are proponents of both sides of the argument. Both sides are sometimes strongly invested in their own views of this issue, as I can tell you are. Both sides can be argued vigorously.

We have many issues in anaphylaxis that fit into the same category. The reason for the debate is that such issues cannot be answered on the basis of controlled trials, and therefore we have no true definitive supporting evidence for either side of the issue.

One such issue, for example, revolves around when to administer epinephrine in a potential case of anaphylaxis. This occurs when a child, thought to be allergic to a food, ingests the food, but has no symptoms after the ingestion. There are proponents of administering epinephrine immediately and there are other proponents who state that the child should be watched and administered epinephrine only if symptoms occur. There are no clear-cut data to support either side. We will never be able to attain these data because we cannot do controlled trials.

We have no controlled trials to compare outcomes in schools where peanuts are banned versus schools where they are not. I do not think this study will ever be done, in part because of the emotional investment in the issue.

So, I do not think it would do a great deal of good to become, on this website, involved in these polemics. However, we are placing your letter online so it can be reviewed by our readers, many of whom are experts and publish in this area.

Thank you again for your interest in our website, and for the expression of your opinion.

Sincerely,
Phil Lieberman, M.D.

Syag Lchochma,

I belong to an online support group for parents of food-allergic children, and there’s much discussion there about the best way to handle food allergies in school. Based on conversations I’ve been privy to there, I can assure you that by and large the parents who request peanut bans in their children’s schools do so out of fear, not out of trendiness.

Shmiras Haloshon – exactly. Parents have very different reasons then many of others on the bandwagon. That is a totally different conversation. I do want to add, just for additional reference, when I feared for my child’s life/safety, I couldn’t even imagine sending him to the place where the danger existed with hopes he would be safe. This has NO bearing on what I think YOU should do, but I wanted to give you reference.

(Meno. You are correct. i gave up on analogy after autocorrect on my phone kept changing the word to something else. It kept correlation, so I used it. one of these days i’ll learn how to disable it. )

“dictate your needs to hundreds of other kids instead”

why assume it is the parent of the allergic child who is dictating anything? Perhaps it is the administration of the school, because they must, by law, accommodate the student and the peanut ban is the easiest way for them to do so.

What other options have worked?

DY -“Far from illustrating that there are other equally safe options, if anything it illustrates that the other options are not as safe”

If that’s true, why aren’t the pro-banning peanuts demanding banning sports also?!?
There’s no such thing as a safe sport! Well maybe Ga-Ga.

Matan1 -“There are preventative measures to make allergens safe. Banning them”

There are preventative measures to make peanuts safe:
All kids should only eat in a lunch room & make sure everyone cleans off afterwards.
The allergic kids should eat in their classroom.

DY -“You don’t break that down into the type of sports being played (I’m against the more dangerous ones),”
Why should I? They are all dangerous!
From above:
“One hundred of the fatalities resulted from an underlying heart condition, 62 were due to a brain injury – typically a subdural hematoma – and 38 were from heat-related causes, according to findings published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine.”
What didn’t you understand? Don’t you think that underlying heart conditions & heat-related causes apply to all sports, except maybe Ga-Ga?!?

“and you don’t consider in the reward factor.”
Yes, I did. The reward is death!
Btw, I’m not against playing sports, swimming, eating peanuts, driving in vehicles, etc.!
In life, you’re allowed to take some chances, not major ones!

”
So you have no problem having a kid eat his lunch by himself, while his friends and classmates get to eat together? Do you think that’s good for that child? ”

Cute, suddenly emotional health is important! lol. What is emotional health in the face of a physical danger (to paraphrase almost all the above posts)? Are we worried about him feeling….inconvenienced perhaps?

In our school, those kids have the privilege of choosing two or three friends a day to have “special lunch” with them in the office. Yes, it actually is very good for that child.