This explains why I had never heard of peanut allergies until I moved to the US. Every kid in the Balkans eats peanut puffs - it’s the default snack and it’s been like that since the 80s.
Great piece. Nits: I think you wrote "equivocal" when you meant to write "unequivocal", and I think you forgot to subtract the seven missing outcomes from the 54 positive in the control group (assuming 54 was the correct original number, the updated should've been 47 instead of 54).
Nit 2: in this case, it's the denominator that increases rather than the numerator decreasing. So the total of allergies counted remains at 54, but 7 are added to the denominator when computing the prevalence.
What's weird about this is it goes strongly against common experience -- 54 out of 320 in the control group developed an allergy? That's 1 in 6! Peanut allergies, even among people who really worry about them, have always been thought of as rare. So either they are being very liberal in what counts as a "peanut allergy" or total peanut withholding from kids was never very common. Hmm, digging into this further, the study you link about UK vs Israeli children indeed shows a little under 2% prevalence of peanut allergy among the UK kids (only 10% of whom had early peanut introduction.)
Ohhhh I think I get it. Both the 2000 AAP recommendations against early peanut introduction AND the LEAP study were restricted to a population of "high-risk" infants, which I think (it's a little confusing) were infants who already had egg allergies or eczema or parents with existing allergies or maybe all three? So that's how you get to 54 out of 320. So maybe the sociology story here was that a recommendation that was intended only for a small population of at-risk babies was adopted by a wider group of parents on a sort of "better safe than sorry" basis? (But I mean the LEAP study makes it clear that the recommendation turned out to be wrong even in that small subgroup.)
1. I appreciate you thinking out loud in the comments section!
2. Your 2nd paragraph agrees with my interpretation of what happened. This was supposed to be guidance for high risk babies, but parental anxiety causes us to think all of our babies are high risk.
The question “why didn’t we know this long ago?” also comes up regarding airborne transmission of respiratory viruses, the importance of which seems only to hav3 been understood after Covid was around for awhile.
Another amusing thing is that "treating like with like" is an old medical idea, which is a basis for all sorts of pseudo-scientific treatments such as homeopathy. But in this case, it really does work.
This explains why I had never heard of peanut allergies until I moved to the US. Every kid in the Balkans eats peanut puffs - it’s the default snack and it’s been like that since the 80s.
I've gotta know: what on earth is the picture at the top of the article?
All of the artwork is contributed by my friend/collaborator Isaac Sparks. He talks about his process here: https://www.isaacsparks.com/
Great piece. Nits: I think you wrote "equivocal" when you meant to write "unequivocal", and I think you forgot to subtract the seven missing outcomes from the 54 positive in the control group (assuming 54 was the correct original number, the updated should've been 47 instead of 54).
Nit 1: doh, my bad. I fixed it.
Nit 2: in this case, it's the denominator that increases rather than the numerator decreasing. So the total of allergies counted remains at 54, but 7 are added to the denominator when computing the prevalence.
What's weird about this is it goes strongly against common experience -- 54 out of 320 in the control group developed an allergy? That's 1 in 6! Peanut allergies, even among people who really worry about them, have always been thought of as rare. So either they are being very liberal in what counts as a "peanut allergy" or total peanut withholding from kids was never very common. Hmm, digging into this further, the study you link about UK vs Israeli children indeed shows a little under 2% prevalence of peanut allergy among the UK kids (only 10% of whom had early peanut introduction.)
Ohhhh I think I get it. Both the 2000 AAP recommendations against early peanut introduction AND the LEAP study were restricted to a population of "high-risk" infants, which I think (it's a little confusing) were infants who already had egg allergies or eczema or parents with existing allergies or maybe all three? So that's how you get to 54 out of 320. So maybe the sociology story here was that a recommendation that was intended only for a small population of at-risk babies was adopted by a wider group of parents on a sort of "better safe than sorry" basis? (But I mean the LEAP study makes it clear that the recommendation turned out to be wrong even in that small subgroup.)
1. I appreciate you thinking out loud in the comments section!
2. Your 2nd paragraph agrees with my interpretation of what happened. This was supposed to be guidance for high risk babies, but parental anxiety causes us to think all of our babies are high risk.
The question “why didn’t we know this long ago?” also comes up regarding airborne transmission of respiratory viruses, the importance of which seems only to hav3 been understood after Covid was around for awhile.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd9149
Another amusing thing is that "treating like with like" is an old medical idea, which is a basis for all sorts of pseudo-scientific treatments such as homeopathy. But in this case, it really does work.