York Region parents react to U.S. peanut allergy announcement
Announcement too late for Thornhill resident

Yorkregion.com
Jan. 20, 2017
By Simone Joseph

For Thornhill resident Jyoti Parmar and her family, it’s too late.

Too late to prevent her children from having a life-threatening allergy that curbs their freedom and fills the Thornhill mother of three with anxiety.

An American government panel released new guidelines on Jan. 5 recommending infants eat food containing peanuts by the time they're six months old to reduce risk of peanut allergy.

“Maybe if someone told me 10 or 12 years ago, I wouldn’t be in this situation,” Parmar said.

She recognizes this is good news for young couples and families.

“If it helps a family, that’s great,” she said. “For me, a cure would be better than prevention.

York Region Public Health supports the recommendation to introduce peanuts into a child’s diet at six months old.

“We have been following this research with interest for a number of years and have also been actively making this recommendation in our practices,” said Melissa Pinto, health educator with the public relations department of the Community and Health Services Department.

For some, the U.S. government guidelines are not news. A statement from the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and the Canadian Paediatric Society was first posted in 2013, and reaffirmed in February 2016.

The Canadian statement said that while there is no evidence that delaying the introduction of any specific food beyond six months of age helps to prevent allergy, the protective effect of early introduction remains under investigation. “Recent research suggests that regularly ingesting a new, potentially allergenic food may be as important as when that food is first introduced,” the statement said.

Parents reacting to the U.S. announcement had a range of reactions. On the Facebook group Mom Rant, one mother said she was told to delay giving her older child peanuts until the child was two years old, and the child has no peanut allergy. With her younger child, she was told to give him every type of food around past 6 months (except honey), and he is the one with the anaphylaxis peanut allergy.

She lamented that the rules have changed considerably in the two years between having her two children. She also pointed out that she ate basically the same things when pregnant with both children, and only one has an allergy.

Another mother said she disregarded food warnings from her doctor and other mothers, and went with the experience of her Israeli family who all gave their babies Bamba, a peanut butter-flavoured snack. None of them are allergic, she said.

Parmar, the Thornhill mother of three, has two children with peanut allergies.

When her eldest and youngest children, age 13 and 7, were little, she was told to avoid peanuts and tree nuts until they were two years of age.

Parmar’s mother told her when she grew up in India, if a child had an allergic reaction, they would be given small amounts of whatever they had reacted to. So her mother suggested Parmar try a similar approach with her child, but at the time, Parmar thought her mother was crazy. Ironically, Parmar is now considering a medical approach for her children similar to her mother’s suggestion, called oral immunotherapy. This approach involves giving increasing amounts of the food over time either by mouth, under the tongue or through the skin.

Parmar’s hunt for a cure for her children’s allergies has taken her to Michigan, where she hopes they can receive immunotherapy.