Boy dies after inhaling allergen

NEW YORK — An 11-year-old boy who died on New Year’s Day after visiting family members in Brooklyn may have had a fatal reaction to fish proteins released into the air while his relatives cooked.

The sixth-grader, Cameron Jean-pierre, had asthma and was allergic to fish and peanuts, his father, Steven Jean-pierre, said Thursday in an interview with WABC.

They had been visiting Cameron’s grandmother in Brooklyn, where one of his relatives was making fish, and Cameron had an asthma attack, Jeanpierre said.

Cameron’s father treated his son with a nebulizer, a device they had used many times in the past to deliver medicine to the boy’s lungs.

At first, it seemed to work, he said. But then Cameron’s condition worsened and the family called for an ambulance.

Cameron’s father said he tried to do CPR, but by the time emergency workers arrived, the child was unconscious and unresponsive, police said. He was pronounced dead when he arrived at the hospital.

The New York City medical examiner is performing an autopsy, a spokeswoman for the office said Friday, adding that the results might not be released for weeks.

While the cause of death has not yet been determined, experts say Cameron’s combination of asthma and allergies could have been to blame.

“We would fully expect the coroner’s report will end up identifying this as a death from asthma induced by an airborne allergen,” said Dr. Robert A. Wood, a professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

It wasn’t the smell of the fish that would have produced the allergic reaction, experts said, but the proteins released by the cooking process.

Hypersensitivity reactions after the inhalation of food particles are an “increasingly recognized problem in children,” according to a report in the journal Allergy and Asthma Proceedings.

Although food allergies affect millions of children, severe reaction to airborne foods is “extraordinarily rare,” Wood said, and fatal reactions are even more rare.