Allergy scares are making people nuts.

Late last year in Washington State, a high school student was convicted of assault and sentenced to four days in jail for smearing peanut butter on the face of a student who is allergic to peanuts.

Smear an allergic boy with peanut butter and you put his life in danger, the judge noted. That didn't happen this time. In fact, the victim didn't suffer any reaction. But the incident could have been fatal.

Or so the judge believed.

Almost anything can kill, at least in theory, but as a practical matter the judge was wrong. It is a myth that mere contact with peanut butter puts the life of an allergic person at significant risk. Lots of people believe it, but it's still not true.

And it's far from the only popular myth about allergies -- which helps explain why more and more schools are banning nuts, why stadiums have "nut-free" sections, and airlines get complaints when they dare to serve the little time bombs.

And it explains why so many parents of children with nut allergies live in a constant state of fear.

"It is really driven by misinformation," says Stuart Carr, a pediatric allergist and assistant clinical professor at the University of Alberta.

Researchers found that between 1991 and 2001, eight British children were killed by reactions to food allergies. That's eight out of 13 million. Milk caused four of those deaths. Not one British child younger than 13 died from peanut allergy.

The researchers calculated that an allergic child's chance of being killed by her food allergy -- any food allergy -- was one in 800,000. Considering that a child's annual chance of dying in a car crash is roughly one in 6,000, that shouldn't be a big concern.
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But even this overstates the threat of food allergy alone. "If you look at people who die from food allergy," says Dr. Carr, "you can almost bank on the fact that they had poorly controlled asthma." An allergic child who doesn't have asthma, or who carefully controls her asthma, will be at even lower risk than the statistics suggest.

The threat posed by skin contact with peanut -- the threat that got Joshua Hickson a criminal record and jail time -- is smaller still.

"With extremely rare exceptions, you have to eat the food in order to trigger a life-threatening reaction," says Dr. Carr, who is also the vice-president of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

In a 2003 study involving "30 highly sensitive children" with peanut allergy, researchers using the gold standard of scientific research --double-blind, placebo-controlled -- tried to determine how likely it is that incidental contact with peanut will cause a reaction. One test involved smearing peanut butter on children's skin. In another, kids breathed air reeking of peanut for 10 minutes.

There were no reactions to inhalation. One-third of the children experienced skin irritation at the spot where they were rubbed with peanut butter but none had "a systemic or respiratory reaction."

Dr. Carr worries that school officials are making a serious mistake when they ban nuts entirely. "There's no evidence that banning certain foods is helpful." Worse, the ban "ends up perpetuating these myths and misconceptions and feeding people's fears."

Modest precautions are enough, Dr. Carr says. Even at home, parents of children with allergies don't have to ban peanut products. "Put it in a place where the kid's not going to get at it. Clean up properly after you eat it. One of my partners has a daughter with a peanut allergy and he eats peanut butter all the time. He just makes sure she doesn't."
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This sort of advice often shocks people. "When they first hear these things there's an awful lot of resistance. They think we're trying to make their children unsafe when what we're really trying to do is improve their quality of life," says Dr. Carr.

"Patients come in and they're crippled by fear. We've had patients who have needed to see a psychologist."

In one astonishing case, Dr. Carr was asked to advise a young woman who had suffered a severe allergic reaction, was taken to hospital, and didn't respond to a dose of adrenaline. So she was given another dose. No response. Another dose.

She had a heart attack. She survived, but when Dr. Carr tested the woman, he found the original diagnosis was wrong. She wasn't allergic. But her fear of allergic reactions was so great she suffered a panic attack when she was exposed -- and the panic attack was mistaken for an allergic reaction.

"There's so much misinformation out there that we spend an enormous amount of time with our patients answering questions, dispelling myths, and talking them down," says Dr. Carr. He even believes that, for most patients, "their quality of life was more severely impaired by their fear of the food allergy then it was by the food allergy itself. I've had kids who have never eaten in a restaurant because their parents are too afraid. I've had families afraid to go on a holiday.

"How can you live your life like that?"

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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