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How the AAP created peanut allergies

2024-10-30 23:34:16.528589+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

The Harvard Gazette: Seem like peanut allergies were once rare and now everyone has them?

The AAP committee mimicked what the UK health department had recommended two years earlier: total peanut abstinence. The recommendation was technically for high-risk children, but the AAP authors acknowledged that, “The ability to determine which infants are high risk is imperfect.” Having a family member with any allergy or asthma could qualify as “high-risk” using the strictest interpretation. And many well-meaning pediatricians and parents read the recommendation and thought, Why take chances? Instantly, pediatricians adopted a simple mnemonic to teach parents in their offices: “Remember 1-2-3. Age 1: start milk. Age 2: start eggs. Age 3: start peanuts.” A generation of pediatricians was indoctrinated with this mantra.

And so, the American Association of Pediatrics, in echoing the UK misreading of a 1996 BMJ study, kicked off and created a generation of peanut allergies.

Excerpted from “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health” by Marty Makary. Via.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Sociology Current Events Handicaps & Disabilities ]

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