Allergy is muddled with myths and misconceptions
It’s the banal, everyday details that make the whole story so unbearable. Tanya Ednan-Laperouse said goodbye to her dying daughter from a mobile phone while waiting helplessly for a delayed flight at Stansted. Fifteen-year-old Natasha had had a severe reaction to sesame seeds in a sandwich while flying to Nice, and died in hospital. I defy any sentient adult to read her mother’s account, and then look at Natasha’s photograph, without blinking back tears.
All deaths are awful, of course, but few seem so immediate. We struggle to imagine losing a child to a Syrian barrel bomb, but we can easily picture ourselves making desperate phone calls from an airport terminal. If you have a daughter of a similar age – trust me on this – you won’t have been able to get Natasha’s face out of your mind all week.
In a horrified statement, Pret A Manger promised to change its labelling rules. But Natasha’s death might also have a less positive consequence. Its vividness could prompt parents to keep small children away from nuts. And that, I’m afraid, would be the worst possible response.
Allergies have become much more common over the past 20 years, especially in developed nations. I remember the first time I heard of someone having an anaphylactic shock of the kind that killed Natasha. It was 1992 and the victim was a 17-year-old girl called Josie who was at my school, three years below me. She collapsed and died after eating pretzels, not realising that they contained traces of peanut.
Anaphylaxis was not on our mental map in those days, and Josie’s death made headlines. Parents around the country hugged their children a little tighter and, quite understandably, began to deny their toddlers nuts – especially peanuts (which are technically legumes). As a result, a generation grew up with a higher incidence of impaired immunity.
A comprehensive study published in 2015 took 640 infants who were at high risk of peanut allergy (because they had severe eczema or tested positive for other allergies). Half were not allowed peanuts, the other half encouraged to eat moderate amounts. Result? By the age of five, the children who had been forbidden peanuts were six times – six times
– more likely to have developed an intolerance than those who had had the odd peanut-butter sandwich. Our immune systems learn, so to speak, from experience. They need exposure to different substances and microbes to become fully functional. A sterile environment breeds a fragile child.
That is not an easy idea. Excessive cleanliness was not a problem in Pleistocene Africa, and our brains are configured to be over-sensitive to toxicity, while being poor at assessing probabilities. A high-profile plane crash, for example, makes people take to their cars, which are vastly more dangerous. Similarly, a high-profile allergy death triggers our genetic fear of contamination. Keeping a substance intuitively categorised as dangerous away from our kids is the most natural response imaginable; sadly, it is mistaken.
It was only a matter of time before the anti-statue agitators took aim at Oliver Cromwell. His bronze memorial outside the House of Commons was controversial from the start, loathed by Irish MPs, who could not forgive his depredations in their land, and by Tories, who resented him as a regicide.
Lord Salisbury, the Conservative prime minister when it was raised in 1899 (it had been commissioned earlier), noted its low-lying position and remarked that a ditch was the best place for it. Modern opponents – the old cavalryman is provocatively cast with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other – liken his regime to the Taliban’s. With delicious irony, they now want to mimic the iconoclasm carried out by some of his Puritan troopers.
Cromwell is perhaps the most divisive figure in our history. His victories ensured that our island, unlike the continent, did not lapse into monarchical absolutism. But, coming to see himself as an English Messiah, he ended up replacing Parliament with a dictatorship. Then again, divisive figures remind us that politics doesn’t divide neatly into goodies and baddies. Heaven knows that today’s statue-smashers, self-righteous and simplistic, need that reminder. FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion