If I told EasyJet that I was gluten intolerant, would they ban glutens for me?
Gluten can induce anaphylaxis in some people. I guess we just wait now for them to ban all gluten-containing foods?
No. But seeing decisions being made based on the lowest common denominator to the inconvenience of everyone else (able bodies people are not inconvenienced by wheelchair ramps) is annoying to everyone who is inconvenienced (edit: for small values of everyone) regardless of whether or not it's an objectively good decision. Some people want peanuts and they're pissed they can't get them because of an edge case. I'm not saying it's right but it's human nature.
But why isn't there more alarm—or even action—over the fact that foods that were near-universally consumed by people are now increasingly capable of quite literally killing a relatively large part of the population? For example, why is hand sanitizer still widely distributed? When will it end? When all we're capable of consuming is powdered formula?
Edit: everyone wondering about hand sanitizer, I was thinking along the lines of the hygiene hypothesis, ie https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12048610_Asthma_and.... I believe I saw this study on here a few years ago.
Edit2: I meant this study https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cea.12527
They appear to have always been allergens to which a certain share of the population had extreme reactions, which is what produced the advice in the US to avoid exposure at ages when children would be unlikely to communicate a reaction, which is what produced the surge in sensitivity since apparently people are more likely to develop lasting and severe allergies if they are not exposed early, which is why the advice has since been reversed to encourage early exposure with close supervision, rather than a avoiding early exposure.
> For example, why is hand sanitizer still widely distributed?
What does hand sanitizer have to do with the issue?
I think dmitryminkovsky is jokingly extrapolating the idea of banning allergens to hand sanitizer, since it is poisonous if you drink too much.
Our bodies are weird. I spent all my summers as a kid in the countryside, with various animals and lots of vegetation. At age 12, for some reason I developed hay fever. I still spend my summers in the countryside and have to eat allergy pills throughout the summer. Is this the effect of hand sanitizer? Autoimmune disease: hand sanitizer? Very hard to pin down.
Avoiding airplanes pretty much means you never travel longer than a thousand km or so. That's a fairly big restriction.
(also, "a whiff of cracked chocolate" is perhaps not as much of a problem as "someone sitting next to you and chewing nuts, and accidentally throwing some of them in your face if there's some turbulence")
Trains exist, and in first-world countries they're usually pleasant to use, even if it takes longer than an airplane.
But then again, if being in an airplane cabin with a peanut eater is dangerous, then being in a train wagon with one probably is as well.
> There is no evidence to support peanut vapor as a cause of reactions or that peanut dust itself circulates and causes reactions.
I am a little surprised to see such uncritical propagation of this myth on HN.
> Investigators concluded that the risk of exposure to peanut on an airplane stems from potentially contaminated surfaces and not from airborne levels.
I've literally had someone spill their food on me on a plane, so direct contact is certainly not out of the question.
> Investigators concluded that the risk of exposure to peanut on an airplane stems from potentially contaminated surfaces and not from airborne levels.
So the issue isn't not having exposure via air, but "not having touched" the peanuts themselves, but interacting with contaminated surfaces.
And there are presumably other passenger risks that they are not responding to with outright bans, so where is the cut-off?
[1] https://fox13now.com/2013/04/26/boy-11-dies-after-severe-all...
