When just a taste, a touch or a whiff of the wrong kind of food could provoke immeasurable hives, asphyxiation or death, every day surroundings present an ever-looming danger.
Danielle Davis, a Charleston, W.Va. high school student, knows this all too well. Davis suffers from severe food allergies. Peanuts and tree nuts—her particular brand of kryptonite—have caused her to go into shock many times. (She’s developed an abnormal familiarity with the inside of an emergency room and has had 20 hospital or clinic visits just this school year.) Her school, Capital High, developed—with the help and dogged persistence of Davis’ mother—a school-wide food policy banning nut products.
Problem solved?
Uh uh.
Lax enforcement measures at Capital High leave Davis vulnerable even with her nifty, little epinephrine pens on hand at all times. Only four U.S. states—Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island and Tennessee—enforce allergy policies throughout the state, rather than leaving it up to schools to implement such regulations.
But universally safe schools, tending to the needs of students with food allergies may not be such a distant dream. The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Management Act, which would institute federal guidelines for allergy management in schools, was approved by the House in April and is awaiting Senate judgment.
More attention is warranted along with stricter, more uniform protocol to address food allergies in schools, especially since children with food allergies are cropping up at younger ages. “The number of children under age 5 suffering from peanut allergy alone has doubled in the past decade,” according to a 2007 Duke University Medical Center study.
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