The American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology disagrees, which I'm surprised by and totally thought they could too. Someone linked to this in another thread.
> What can occur is that the patient smells an allergen, and that smell triggers a strong memory of a past reaction or the fear of having a reaction and signs and symptoms of panic may occur – including an increase in heart rate, tight breathing, flushing of the skin and nervousness, all of which could be mistaken as signs and symptoms of anaphylaxis. ... While smells can linger in the air, the allergen proteins do not, which is why smelling a food will not trigger anaphylaxis.
Interestingly some allergens like those in shellfish /can/ aerosolize in a boiling pot, however according to them peanuts cannot. I can still absolutely see airlines reacting to passengers thinking they're having attacks and eliminating peanut snacks out of caution and to avoid the issues even an imagined attack can cause on a flight. That and the risk of surface contamination probably?
Yes, the panic attack thing is pretty real. Know someone that had a severe allergic reaction, basically started choking to death, paramedics involved, all that. The experience imprinted itself deeply, such that she's deathly afraid of it happening again, and gets triggered with panic attacks. She's like two years on from the experience and through a lot of work she's much better, but it's pretty crazy how broadly it has impacted her life as an anxiety disorder. She knows it's not logical, but describes it as a fear of death and of a spiraling nature such that if she can't arrest it in the moment it compounds very badly, which reinforces the phenomenon - panicking about panicking. Anxiety over a panic reaction. So to be clear, it's not an allergic reaction she's experiencing but trauma from one in the past.
When I told my doctor about my oldest having a reaction to a chocolate bar with peanuts, one of his first questions was "did he react before he knew it had peanuts?"
He's pretty anxious about food in general, so it actually made a lot of sense.
It's not logically thought out, emotion is a parallel decision making process to logical thought. It may be that in some circumstances, fear is a logical outcome of a stimulus, but that's not the same thing.
Second having brain damage and being incapable of processing emotion, doesn't mean that the rest of the brain hasn't been affected. In other words, a brain with an inability to process emotion, may also have an inability to process logical thought outcomes unrelated to the loss of emotional processing.
But look... the brain is complex. It's not some sort of pre-planned construct, as I'm sure you know it's an evolved organ, layered, complex. For example, memory imprint seems to be heavily impacted by emotion. Note that I'm not saying "only formed by", but impacted.
It's why you get PTSD, and it makes sense. Think mouse set upon by cat, the mouse naturally was exceptionally fearful, panicking, adrenaline, and it's very important that the mouse associates any reference to 'cat' with 'fear' and 'apprehension'. So the concept that emotion can fix survival important memories into memory, is seemingly a sensible one.
Yet for all of this, we can lay down knowledge and retain it without a cat standing over our shoulder. Realistically, we have multiple decision making processes, and ways to store memory, and so on, running in parallel.
Parallel also doesn't mean, by the way, that one cannot be affected by the other. You can use one decision making process to affect another. You can quell emotional response with reason, and emotional response can quell logical thought. Again, complex.
Effectively, what I'm saying here is that this is a complex topic. And that I'm sticking with my rendition, whilst explaining that 'parallel' doesn't imply 'isolated'.
By the way, fun 30 minute dive into that book/author/articles, thanks for the link.
To me it seems like if they logically know the smell can not cause harm having a strong emotional fear reaction is illogical. Of course most emotions are so that's not meant to be a blame or anything...
Because it means you're in the immediate vicinity of a thing that can kill you and has nearly killed you before?
Is it fair to call it "illogical" to panic when someone puts a bag over your head when you were previously kidnapped and almost murdered after someone put a bag over your head?
To add some clarification - the event has caused general anxiety and risk of panic attacks, such that even driving down streets or flying on planes as she's done a thousand times before starts filling her with anxiety and panic. It's the panicking about panicking which has expanded the scope beyond just being in the identical scenario as before. That's the part that she recognizes as illogical - driving down the street shouldn't cause anxiety, as she's done it without incident many times before. There are no new identifiable dangers or risks. But it's a combination of intrusive thoughts, physical reactions, all that, which can spiral. Being on the outside it's very hard for me to comprehend, but there's a sense of no control over the chain reaction. There are techniques she has adopted, like using the DARE app regularly and other therapy techniques which have helped unwind this, but it takes a long time. Time is a damn good healer though.
Yes. In fact, last time I checked (4 years ago), no one has ever had a reaction from (for example) kissing someone who just ate peanut butter too, which for a while everyone claimed could case a reaction. There was a reported case 12+ years ago in Montreal, but it was soon retracted as a mistake.
Dust can also be an issue. It's definitely a cause of concern for pistachios, where cracking the shells releases enough pistachio dust to cause skin rash to my allergic daughter, even though she's never touched a pistachio in her life. Cracking shelled peanuts can likely cause the same issue, I'd wager.
Although peanuts served in planes are not in the shell, I can imagine how having potentially allergic people in close contact to people potentially oblivious to allergy issues eating peanuts sitting right next to them and eating peanuts could be problematic.
> I can still absolutely see airlines reacting to passengers thinking ...
That, plus a dozen other scenarios which airlines do not want paying out in their airplanes. Or even post-flight, if some lawyer wanted to argue that the fatal peanut fell into mommy's purse during her flight back home to her family.
Thank you, I always found that story hard to believe, despite flight attendants confidently repeating it on PA. My most bizarre experience was when they one time announced a "very, very special guest among us today", which turned out to be somebody "so allergic to peanuts, if anybody anywhere on the plane opens any food containing peanuts, they will go into anaphylactic shock IMMEDIATELY, so please don't"...
Yeah that's definitely the issue with the shellfish. I'm just more surprised the allergen is sufficiently different from the smell that they are disconnected in peanuts.
Molecules responsible for smells tend to be small, on the order of 100-300 Daltons—otherwise they aren’t able to diffuse easily in the air.
The vast majority of allergens, on the other hand, are proteins, with the very smallest proteins being on the order of 1 kiloDalton. Large proteins get up into hundreds to thousands of kDa.
I also suspect there's not much reason to boil peanuts in water outside of the very specific (and delicious) snack called boiled peanuts. I can't really think of any other dish that uses them as a normal ingredient. Most of the time you'd toast them in oil for dishes or use peanut oil afaik.
I love boiled peanuts and I'm always tempted on roadtrips to grab some when I go through areas where they appear as gas station snacks. Usually that's when I'm down into South Carolina or farther south.
I ended up in the hospital after walking by my roommate who was washing off a knife with peanut butter on it in hot water in the sink. I just inhaled a single breath of steam and in minutes I couldn't breathe!
My first thought here would be to blame "solid" particles of peanut butter flung into the air by blasting them with a water stream, unrelated to temperature
That does sound like something that would be a real issue, but only in close proximity
Even though I know this, smelling peanuts (especially peanut butter) makes me intensely uncomfortable and I'm happy they're not served on most flights anymore. I'm not trying to ban anyone from taking their own peanuts on the flight (although I wish they wouldn't) but not needing to worry about it coming from the airline is a huge load off my mind.
Also, thinking as the airline, I'd do anything possible to avoid causing anaphylaxis on a flight, starting by simply removing common allergens from the menu. In the modern world, pretty much the only times an anaphylaxis attack would actually threaten my life would be camping in the wilderness and on a flight. Anaphylaxis has a great survival rate if you have an epipen and can get to a hospital quickly, and if you can't it's all down to how bad your allergy is and what meds you have available. Maybe I'm stupid but I don't bring on a flight the steroids that I'd bring camping, and I doubt the airplane has a supply either.
This explains a lot. I always wondered why airlines eliminated peanuts but never ask passengers to avoid eating peanut products they'd brought on themselves, and why peanut based foods can be so common in public if there are "airborne peanut allergies".
I have been on several flights in the last couple of years where the flight attendants have asked that no one open/consume peanuts or peanut snacks while on board due to a passenger with a severe allergy.
All considering for the person affected (and my desire to not end up at an alternate airport for hours/overnight) has always seemed like an easy thing to do.
Well, according to the AAAAI, "airborne peanut allergens" are not actually a thing.
I'm all for consideration for others, especially when crammed into a tight space for hours on end, but once we get into the realm of purely psychological effects, where do we draw the line? For example, there are people that are absolutely convinced that my phone's electromagnetic radiation will cause them discomfort, yet in-flight Wi-Fi is a thing.
To be clear, I'm totally on board with limiting common allergens in airplane food, but please let me eat my own peanuts in peace instead of further facilitating mass hysteria.
> What can occur is that the patient smells an allergen, and that smell triggers a strong memory of a past reaction or the fear of having a reaction and signs and symptoms of panic may occur – including an increase in heart rate, tight breathing, flushing of the skin and nervousness, all of which could be mistaken as signs and symptoms of anaphylaxis. ... While smells can linger in the air, the allergen proteins do not, which is why smelling a food will not trigger anaphylaxis.
Interestingly some allergens like those in shellfish /can/ aerosolize in a boiling pot, however according to them peanuts cannot. I can still absolutely see airlines reacting to passengers thinking they're having attacks and eliminating peanut snacks out of caution and to avoid the issues even an imagined attack can cause on a flight. That and the risk of surface contamination probably?
https://www.aaaai.org/tools-for-the-public/conditions-librar...
edit: dang scooped by 5 minutes.