Foxmeister said:What is with all the peanut allergies these days? When I was a kid in school, we had peanut butter sandwiches served quite often. I never heard of a kid being allergic to peanuts back then. It seems these days, 1 out of 5 kids are allergic to peanuts.
This is one of the modern mysteries of medicine. It is true that the prevalence of peanut allergy has increased very dramatically in the past 20 years or so (not to one in five children, but still high nevertheless: probably between 1 and 2 per cent of the population as a whole; it is usually lifelong). As far as I know, no-one really knows why. One review article, for example, notes that the prevalence of peanut allergy seems to have increase twofold to threefold over five years in the early 1990s. It also seems to be largely a feature of "Anglo-Celtic" countries (Australia, NZ and the UK especially; the US, Canada and Ireland to a lesser extent), as does the increase in asthma that we have seen over the past 20 or 30 years.Foxmeister said:What is with all the peanut allergies these days? When I was a kid in school, we had peanut butter sandwiches served quite often. I never heard of a kid being allergic to peanuts back then. It seems these days, 1 out of 5 kids are allergic to peanuts.