Years ago, when we were young, did you know of any friends to have dropped dead of peanut butter exposure? I know at my kid's school there are three kids with "deadly" peanut butter allergies. I'd never heard of this prior to my kids going to school.

How many of our friends mysteriously died after eating peanut butter? Did they die before they went to school and before they became our friends? I wonder...

I have to think that it is some strange genetic marker, activated in our generation and passed onto our children, that comes from sitting too close to the television set.

Or perhaps DDT. I remember each summer the town truck would pass through our neighborhood (which was wooded) releasing the billowing clouds of DDT from the back.

We actually used to run though it. It was mixed with some other chemical that gave it a kind of sickly sweet, orchid smell.

Explains a lot, really.

I wonder about the allergy sensitivities, autism, and other odd miseries of today's youth. There does seem to be a lot of it. I have to think a lot of it is environmental in cause.

Or, alternatively, I wonder if our parents generation simply didn't leave a lot of our contemporaries exposed on the hillsides as babies, then simply kept it all quiet in that strange discipline they learned during the War.

It is amazing how many kids today have the dread peanut allergy when no one we knew as kids did. We all ate peanut butter in copious amounts and live to tell about it.

Makes you wonder.

I blame Algore.

It has become such an issue at the local YMCA where I work out that the ONLY acceptable food to bring in for your kids to eat while you excersise is Goldfish. Not even pretzel goldfish..just the regular cheese kind. I think someone even said some thing about the extra cheese flavor being off limits!!!What the ____??

I was on a Jet Blue flight in December (maybe September, they all blur together) wherein they made an announcement that the snacks had been altered because there was someone with a severe peanut allergy on board. Apparently it was so bad we couldn't even eat things that had peanut oil in them.

Strange.

I actually think it is a mutation from all the vaccines kids get these days, and at the ridiculously early age of a few days old. I am only 43, went to large public schools, you did not see all these kids with these super sensitivities, as well as so many that have asthma.
Sorry, I just have a little "hippie" in me, not trying to be a flaming troll. PS: yes, I have children, yes, I have a real college education AND a career in medicine.

I was in a babysitting co-op for many years. One of the kids in the co-op had an extreme allergy to peanuts. His mother bought some "health bars" from Mother's Health Food Store. The kid ate one and died before his parents could boot him with the eppie shot... Right in front of the TV the kid dropped dead.

I don't know why this whole peanut allergy is happening. Yeah, I've eaten my weight in peanut butter as has everyone my age. The fact is that it is now deadly to some.

Cheri - You say vaccines? You might be on to something there. As far as asthma is concerned, I always chalked that up to air pollution as I raised my children in SoCal. EVERYONE seemed to have an inhaler...
Actually, a pathetic little story; when the boys were in public elementary school we used to have a jog-a-thon (can't remember what the money was raised for). Anyhoo, the jog-a-thon needed to be scheduled during a "clean air" day. Adults would stand by with various children's inhalers... Kind of like giving water to marathon runners the kids would huff their inhalers before going another lap.

One wonders if peanuts are being processed differently now than they were in our youth and if perhaps the allergy is not directly to the peanut oil but to some endemic parasite that a good dose of some illegal pesticide or chemical additive used to eradicate.

I grew up in a small town in Virginia where peanuts were processed. Peanuts grew all around. There was peanut dust all over, and on certain days when the factory roasted, the whole town smelled like roasted peanuts. No allergies there! Maybe the weak died young? Or early exposure kept them well? And, Abbot, we too ran behind the DDT truck and played in the mist. Lived to tell about it, too.