Food Allergies: Deadly Taunts
By Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 4/23/2008 11:39:00 AM
Cyber bullying may be making headlines these days, but there’s a lesser know form of school harassment: bullying kids with food allergies.
ABC News this week featured a story about this scary trend, which comes at a time when allergies are increasing among America's young.
Sarah VanEssendelft, a 14-year-old from Mastic, NY, described how girls trying to exclude her from their lunch table hatched a plan to bring peanut butter sandwiches to school to aggravate her allergies. It didn't happen, thanks to a student tipster. But it's frightening to contemplate what might have occurred. Just two weeks after the incident, another kid innocently unwrapped a peanut butter cup in Sarah's class.
The odor alone sent the young girl to the emergency room barely able to breathe.
"Education is what it's all about," says Dr. Scott Sicherer, an associate professor of pediatrics with the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine. When a student at a particular school has a severe allergy usually it's the school nurse who's in charge of making sure that school personnel know what to do, the physician says. But "There are occasions where families are reluctant for other people to know about the allergy," Sicherer points out. "Maybe this [food allergy bullying] is part of the reason why."
At a recent conference in which Sicherer met with teenagers, participants were asked to raise their hand if they were ever teased about their allergies. The result? "Everyone in the audience raised their hand," the doctor said.
Sicherer goes on to describe a 2006 study he conducted along with other Mt. Sinai researchers and the Food Allergy Analphyaltic Network. Teen-agers with food allergies were asked what was the most important thing that educators and other adults could do to help. "The main thing that they wanted was education of their peers,” Sicherer says. "The reason that that was number one wasn't that they wanted special tables or special foods--[only that] their friends would understand the allergy. They didn't want to be the ones in charge of that education."
