Janet Levatin

Essential Reading for Every Parent In the early 1990s, tens of thousands of children with severe peanut and food allergies arrived for kindergarten at schools in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. The phenomenon of a life-threatening allergy in kids in only these countries occurred simultaneously, without warning, and it quickly intensified. The number of peanut allergic children in the United States alone went from virtually none to about two million in just twenty years. As these children have aged, the combined number of American adults and children allergic to peanuts has grown to a total of four million. How and why has this epidemic occurred? In The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, Heather Fraser explains: Precisely when the peanut allergy epidemic began How a child-specific allergy epidemic happened before, at the close of the nineteenth century That in the early twentieth century doctors including the 1913 Nobel Prize in medicine winner identified vaccination as the cause of the first pediatric allergy epidemic impacting 50 percent of children That more than one hundred years of medical literature describes how vaccination creates allergy to what is in the shot, air, or body at the time of injection How changes in US vaccination legislation sparked the allergy epidemic in children Fraser also highlights alternative medicines and explores issues of vaccine safety and other food allergies, making this fully updated second edition a must-read for every parent, teacher, and health professional.

Why is the peanut allergy an epidemic that only seems to be found in Western cultures? Over four million people in the United States alone are affected by peanut allergies, while there are no reported cases in India, a country where peanuts are the primary ingredient in many baby food products. Where did this allergy come from, and does medicine play any kind of role in the phenomenon? After her own child had an anaphylactic reaction to peanut butter, historian Heather Fraser decided to discover the answers to these questions. In The Peanut Allergy Epidemic, Fraser delves into the history of this allergy, trying to understand why it largely develops in children and studying its relationship with social, medical, political, and economic factors. In an international overview of the subject, she compares the epidemic in the United States to sixteen other geographical locations, finding that in addition to the United States, in countries such as Canada, the UK, Australia, and Sweden there is a one in fifty chance that a child, especially a male, will develop a peanut allergy. Fraser also highlights alternative medicines and explores issues of vaccine safety and other food allergies, making his book a must-read for every parent, teacher, and health professional.