Comment by spacephysics
4 years ago
I don’t know, I feel this is a slippery slope. I don’t want everything to be on the same level of caution as peanuts, let’s look at root cause for this stuff.
Most likely could being an over-sterilized environment during pregnancy or at birth, some chemical in common products, or something else effecting the micro biome or immune system.
It's not a slippery slope. There's a small list of known deadly allergens. Those need to be taken seriously.
There's a small list of commonly deadly allergens, but there's a ton of diversity in the population of people, and some people react with anaphylaxis for items beyond the top 8 or 9.
> Asero and colleagues29 recently reported on a series of 1110 adolescent and adult Italian patients (mean age 31 years, range 12–79 years) diagnosed with food allergy based on history of reaction in the presence of positive skin prick test (SPT) or elevated food-specific serum IgE. Anaphylaxis was reported by 5% of food-allergic individuals, with the most common cause being lipid transfer protein (LTP). LTP is a widely cross-reacting plant pan-allergen. Offending food for LTP-allergic patients was most often peach, but included also other members of the Rosaceae family of fruits (apple, pear, cherry, plum, apricot, medlar, almond, strawberry), tree nuts, corn, rice, beer, tomato, spelt, pineapple, and grape. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440177/#:~:tex...
Peanuts, sesame, pineapples, eggs, fish, shellfish. The list may be small but it's varied. Yes, deadly allergies should be taken seriously,and reasonably. Banning entire classes of food for those not allergic seems much.
Ha it's like saying speed limits are a slippery slope, and we'll trend closer to 0 mph over time. It's not a slope, it's a dial!
I don’t think it’s tremendously slippery, but I do think it’s a slope. It’s hard to imagine the government ever removing an allergen from the mandatory labeling list - if they did, a lot of people who got used to having it would find themselves in more trouble than if it had never been there.
If speed limits aren't, it is just because of the distribution of benefits
With speed limits, almost everyone suffers and almost everyone benefits. Of course, some people are more likely to be walking, and other driving, but it is not a core part of their identity.
Whenever something makes a specific small group much safer and around 100% of the people pay the cost, giving in and making those people safer is a slippery slope. There are infinite such cases, the system points towards more safety because of lawsuits, and careful cost benefit analysis is harder because there is no one person for which cost and benefit are similar -- for some it is just a small cost, for others just a gigantic benefit.
You'll get a small percentage doing a lot of activism and a large majority harmed, but not enough to fight it.