Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Which avoidance for peanut allergic children?

OK, I know I said this wasn't going to be a blog about peanut allergies, but I don't have anywhere else to store related stuff like this. Was just notified of a preprint article appearing in PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine. The article is in French, but the abstract is in English, and it suggests that instead of trying to avoid all contact with any trace of peanuts (even the products that "may contain peanuts - see the connection?), folks should instead only worry about the visible nuts, and not the invisible stuff. Here's the abstract:
We analyzed, from the literature, the balance benefit/risk of a strict avoidance of peanut in children with peanut allergy. The benefits of a strict avoidance diet seem limited: reactions to the low doses and to the peanut oil refined are rare and most often slight. It is not proven that a strict avoidance facilitates the cure of allergy. On the other hand, strict avoidance could induce a worsening of allergy, with deterioration of quality of life, creation of food neophobia. In case of cure of allergy, it is difficult to normalize the diet after a strict avoidance. Outside of the rare sensitive patients to a very low dose of peanut, for which a strict avoidance is counseled, the report benefits risk is in favor of the prescription of adapted avoidance to the eliciting dose. For the majority of the peanut allergic children, it seems to us that the avoidance can and must be limited to the non hidden peanut.
Do you try to avoid any food that may contain nuts, or do you only watch out for the obvious ones?

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Ewww, not spiders!

Here in Canada all our labels are bi-lingual, English and French. Makes label reading a little interesting, in that the French word for "peanut" is "arachides". Even though I know that, more than once I've glanced at the label of something quickly and that word has jumped out at me as "arachnids"!!!

peut contenir des traces d'arachides

See? May contain traces of spiders! ;-)