Health news you can use.
- Push-back against the anti-vaccine crowd: Book Is Rallying Resistance to the Antivaccine Crusade (NYT, 1/13)
- Push-back against “mass psychogenic illness”: Nut allergies — a Yuppie invention (LAT, 1/9)
“But I wouldn’t go into a bookstore and sign books. It can get nasty. There are parents who really believe that vaccines hurt their children, and to them, I’m incredibly evil. They hate me.”
Dr. Offit, a pediatrician, is a mild, funny and somewhat rumpled 57-year-old. The chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he is also the co-inventor of a vaccine against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease that kills 60,000 children a year in poor countries.
“When Jonas Salk invented polio vaccine, he was a hero — and I’m a terrorist?” he jokes, referring to a placard denouncing him at a recent demonstration by antivaccine activists outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Parents may think they are doing their kids a favor by testing them and being hyper-vigilant about monitoring what they eat, but it’s not cool to freak kids out. Only 20% of kids who get a positive allergy test result need treatment. And a 2003 study showed that kids who were told they were allergic to peanuts had more anxiety and felt more physically restricted than if they had diabetes. “It’s anxiety-producing to imagine that having a snack in kindergarten could be deadly,” Christakis said. Remember, this is a demographic so easily panicked that, equipped with only circles and dots, it invented an inoculation to cooties.
A few years ago, I was at a bar without food, so I started downing peanuts. Around the third bowl, I started coughing and felt this itchiness in the back of my throat, which I quickly treated with beer. Still, for a few minutes, I was convinced that a peanut allergy was about to kill me. If the beer had not made me forget the incident, I might have avoided nuts for the rest of my life. Or, worse, bored everyone at the table with my questions about nut allergies.
Totally unfair. Utterly delightful.