Sick of It All
Your kids not feeling well? Could be bubonic plague, flu, or a food allergy. They’re all one and the same to the Centers for Disease Control:
Food allergies in American children seem to be on the rise, now affecting about 3 million kids, according to the first federal study of the problem.
…
About 1 in 26 children had food allergies last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Wednesday. That’s up from 1 in 29 kids in 1997.
Sounds serious. But I’m curious about the study’s methodology. Here it is, buried deep in the article:
The CDC results came from an in-person, door-to-door survey in 2007 of the households of 9,500 U.S. children under age 18.
When asked if a child in the house had any kind of food allergy in the previous 12 months, about 4 percent said yes. The parents were not asked if a doctor had made the diagnosis, and no medical records were checked. Some parents may not know the difference between immune system-based food allergies and digestive disorders like lactose intolerance, so it’s possible the study’s findings are a bit off, Branum said.
That’s not a study; that’s a poll. And while I’m skeptical of the abundance of food allergies — particularly the idea of airborne nut molecules killing kids (really? funny no one ever drops dead in midtown Manhattan from the nut roasters) — I do believe such allergies exist and some children have them. In most cases allergies can be diagnosed through objective measures, diagnoses which the CDC could anonymously gather from pediatricians and allergists and collate. Relying on anecdotal polling to create a “study” which will doubtlessly be used to implement policies (such as blanket institution-wide bans on nuts and peanuts like the one at my youngest’s school) is worse than worthless. It confuses the issue for those with allergies and restricts the behavior of those without.
But I’m not a doctor:
However, the study’s results mirror older national estimates that were extrapolated from smaller, more intensive studies, said Dr. Hugh Sampson, a food allergy researcher at the Mount Sinai School of medicine.
“This tells us those earlier extrapolations were fairly close,” Sampson said.
Translation: This latest poll jibes with other polls we’ve taken in the past.
Article here. CDC report here.
