News

NEW YORK, NY August 23, 2007 —Nurses in city schools had more than 5,000 visits last year from students with mild or severe reactions to food. Recently, Governor Spitzer signed a bill that takes hopes to improve how schools identify, accommodate and treat children with food allergies. WNYC's Fred Mogul has more.

PALIN: This is like a Malomar. it's from a company based in Canada

REPORTER: Roxane Palin is obsessed with nuts.

PALIN: Canada seems to have amazing regulations for peanut awareness and allergen awareness

REPORTER: You might be, too, if your kids were allergic to them.

PALIN: Look what it says here: it says prepared in a nut-free, peanut-free facility. Now, nothing could make me feel safer than handing one of these to my children.

REPORTER: Palin is shopping today in an Upper East Side supermarket, looking for treats for her 8-year-old daughter Amanda, and her 6-year-old son, Ben. They can’t eat peanuts and hazelnuts. Because her husband is allergic, Palin had her kids tested when they were young, and they turned out to be, too. They haven’t had any major incidents, because she takes so many precautions. She doesn’t want them to go through what once happened to her husband, when he accidentally ate a cookie with nuts several years ago.

PALIN: And he had a horrible reaction. He was in the ICU for four days. And his parents got on a plane when they heard he was in the hospital. And they didn't know whether he would be dead or alive when they arrived.

REPORTER: Food allergies can play out in a number of different ways, depending on the type of food and the sensitivity of the person. For some, even inhaling a little or being touched by someone who just ate a peanut butter sandwich can cause a reaction – anything from itching and hives to anaphylactic shock, which disrupts breathing and heartbeat. Nationwide, food allergies cause about 30-thousand trips to emergency rooms and 100-200 deaths annually. Dr. Scott Sicherer from Mount Sinai Medical Center says there are no vaccines, and no equivalents to Claritin or Allegra, types of drugs that help control pollen allergies and that you can take in advance when your anticipating allergen exposure.

SICHERER: I know it sounds weird: How could milk kill you? How could eggs kill you? How could wheat kill you? But a small amount of food can actually take somebody’s life, and the source of nourishment for one person can be deadly for another.

REPORTER: Palin is confident that her kids’ schools could handle an accident, if one of them ate the wrong cookie. But she thinks ALL schools should be prepared, whether or not parents approach them first. That’s why she supported the new law. It calls for a commission to be formed to draw up guidelines for training teachers, nurses and administrators to deal with food problems, before and after allergic reactions occur.

PALIN: It’s not saying eliminate peanut butter from school. It’s saying that there has to be a plan of action: Where’s the benadryl? When there’s a field trip, how do we handle this? A child should never be excluded from a classroom project because of their allergy.

REPORTER: About 5 percent of children have food allergies. Many outgrow them eventually, leaving about 3 or 4 percent of adults. The main problem foods are nuts, shellfish, wheat, milk, eggs and soy. Dr. Sicherer, the author of "The Complete Peanut Allergy Handbook," says it’s not just perception. These problems are more and more common. One theory is that in the developed world, we’ve improved sanitation, deployed antibiotics, and reduced or eliminated parasites so much that our immune systems have gotten a little warped.

SICHERER: If you think of our immune system as . . . something that’s set up to fight infections, and it’s sort of looking for something to chew on, it ends up attacking proteins and other things, and it ends up being counter-productive.

REPORTER: The bill had no problem passing. It didn’t have a single opponent in the state senate and only one dissenting vote in the Assembly, Smithtown Long Island's Michael Fitzpatrick.

FITZPATRICK: We’re not talking about a lot of students. And this is what we hire administrators for.

REPORTER: He sees it as a classic unfunded mandate from the state to local school districts, one more little thing communities will need to spend money on, when taxes are already high.

FITZPATRICK: Could it save lives? Yes, it could. But , I don’t think it’s necessary to mandate something. You take the child to the nurse, the nurse is properly trained, and the process moves from there.

REPORTER: Now that Governor Spitzer has signed the bill into law, it will be up to his office and the legislature to appoint a blue-ribbon panel. That group will then decide what sort of plans and what sort of training to require from schools, and how much leeway individual districts will have. But as Fitzpatrick says, it’s likely to cost something, but no one has put a price tag on the project now.