Why are peanut allergies so deadly and seemingly more prevalent than ever before?

Question

Why are peanut allergies so deadly and seemingly more prevalent than ever before?

Answer 1

Peanut allergies are so deadly because they cause a violent reaction in those who suffer from them.

A peanut allergy is a reaction that occurs when your body mistakenly identifies peanuts as harmful substances. When you eat peanuts or food containing peanuts, your immune system (the body's natural defense system that fights infections and diseases) overreacts and can cause a serious, even life-threatening response. It releases chemicals, including histamine, into your blood. These chemicals can affect different tissues in the body, such as the skin, eyes, nose, airways, intestinal tract, lungs, and blood vessels.

Symptoms of peanut allergy can range from mild to life-threatening. If you have a mild reaction, you may get a stomachache, a runny nose, an itchy skin rash, hives, or tingling in your lips or tongue. If your reaction is worse, you may develop additional symptoms such as a tight throat, hoarse voice, wheezing, coughing, feeling sick, stomach pains, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. Your symptoms may start from within a few minutes to a few hours after eating peanuts or peanut products.

People who are allergic to peanuts may have a life-threatening reaction called anaphylaxis. Symptoms of anaphylaxis can include difficulty breathing and swallowing, vomiting and diarrhea, dizziness, dangerously low blood pressure, swelling of the lips, tongue, throat, and other parts of the body, and loss of consciousness. If not treated, death can result. Anaphylaxis usually occurs within minutes but can occur up to several hours after eating peanuts or peanut products.

Nobody actually knows why this happens and there may be a variety of reasons why it has become more prevalent than previously. To start with peanuts were grown abroad and used locally but now they are exported on a wide scale to distant countries where they were a rarity. They now are on every supermarket shelf and inexpensive. Previously people did not buy ready made meals and cooked their food from basic ingredients bought locally. Oils came from various sources, and not so often from peanuts. These days many ready made foods contain peanut oil if only because the machinery used to make them is peanut oil.

Finally peanut allergy worsens with exposure to peanuts, so for a while those prone to it only have very mild symptoms, or the allergy goes un-noticed, but these increase and become more violent. Until this was realised and tests were developped, people were ill and there seemed to be no logical explanation to their physical reactions, and if they died it was simply assumed that food poisoning that was the cause without linking it with peanuts.

Answer 2

because if someone smells peanuts and is allergic it will close there lungs and they wont be able to breathe