Milk allergy death- should the book be thrown at the staff involved?

[mids2019]

....or if you are minimum wage staff member working in a stressed environment without English as a first language there should be leniency. Doctors are paid for life and death decisions but are Costa staff?

I had campylobacter food poisoning a number of years ago. It triggered Guillaine Barre syndrome. I didn’t die but it affected my nerves and left me in pain and unable to walk. It took years to get back to normal activity and I still have pain. Food safety is a very serious thing, allergies or not.

Can't find the article now but I'm sure I read that the mother said no one at the dentist offered her an epipen and that she was shaking her head when the dentist was answering the questions. I would imagine the dentist is telling the truth though and the mother just remembered wrong or perhaps didn't hear at the time.

To make it even worse the customer in the pharmacy who tried to resuscitate her had her own epipen on her, but that wasn't used as presumably they weren't told that the pharmacist didn't have a high enough dose! The pharmacist said they would have used the customers epipen if they had known.

I can't believe the amount of people saying the barista isn't to blame because she's on minimum wage when I bet a lot of them entrust their child's life to nursery workers every day. That is so much more responsibility for the same pay.

I mean, if you follow the logic that only highly paid medical professionals are liable for people's deaths, then a whole load of people can do a shoddy job and not get the blame. Tired taxi drivers, car mechanics not putting things back together properly, cleaners using hazardous chemicals, care workers giving the wrong medication... we trust so many people to do their jobs properly to keep us safe. Why is a barista any different.

I genuinely think it's because it's an allergy, the misconceptions around allergies are astounding. If a child had died from food poisoning or another cause because of a negligent mistake, the responses would be so different.

To be fair if I was the mother I would sue too. Because what else could I do in my grief? How else could I live with myself?

It would be the only thing that made sense. But ultimately it was a cascade of failures. Had she even remained in the Dentist and an ambulance been rang, it's possible the child would be alive now and it would just be another sacked employee. Leaving the dentist was another error and thinking about it the reaction must have been quite discernable for the dentist to have offered the pen in the first place.

I genuinely think it's because it's an allergy, the misconceptions around allergies are astounding

Honestly overall it's not. People without allergies are not understanding why, if they could be so serious, you are taking such risks and transferring responsibility for your life to the hands of strangers to the point you will sue them for an easy to make mistake.

Also I find many people with children with nut allergies saying 'we're not even walking into a thai or Indian food restaurant' but dairy allergists saying they are happy to walk in a milk drenched coffee shop. You have to admit it's confusing messaging to people who are unacquainted with serious allergies.

I don't think it was that discernable.
Hannah ran to the bathroom saying it wasn't soya milk and was coughing up phlegm, apparently at that point the mother was arranging a new dentist appointment.
The dentist said he spoke to Hannah briefly and she said she was fine, and there was no sign of panicking or distress.

This is how I feel. My daughter is now 16 and had a life threatening milk allergy. She’s needed her epipen twice. Once she was treated in an ambulance for over an hour before they were able to move her to hospital ( in France). I take all our food on holiday now. The only place she will eat out in the UK is pizza express as the pizza base is dairy free and she has ham and tomato on it. She doesn’t have vegan cheese as she knows if there’s no cheese, she knows they have it right.

she can’t go into coffee shops as the milk in the air makes her very unwell. It’s a very sad way to live and she struggles mentally with the stress. I don’t know how she will navigate the next few years doing to university or whatever her future brings and I don’t know how I will stop worrying about her. We’ve already had talks about not getting drunk so she’s always in control.

This is a terribly sad case that scares me so much. I wish everyone understood that milk allergies can be just as severe as everyone refers to nut allergies and nuts are much easier to avoid than milk.

Another example of nut privilege I think - people with nut or peanut allergies are used to nut free schools and an allergen that's really easy to avoid, so the thoughts of a kitchen with nuts everywhere is (understandably) terrifying.

Milk is everywhere though, so people with milk allergies will be much more accustomed to working around that. Otherwise they'd never bring their DC to a playground in case someone had smeared ice-cream everywhere or a baby had dropped their bottle. Or allow their DC to go to school.

(I don't think I'd bring my DD who's allergic to peanuts to a Thai restaurant. But if she had the same level of allergy to milk I reckon we'd be getting the odd hot chocolate in high street shops with good processes. Maybe, it's an "if", so who knows how I'd feel.)

Well with proper procedures in place, it shouldn't be an easy mistake to make. Nobody is grabbing a bottle of cleaning liquid and making drinks with it, so if they applied the same care to making sure they use the correct milk then it wouldn't happen. Cow milk comes in completely different packaging to other milks. If a customer has an allergy, it's a simple procedure to make sure you repeat the order back to them to confirm what they asked for. Or to show them the milk carton. It takes seconds and any idiot can do it. If allergies were better understood, then people wouldn't be making these mistakes.

As multiple people have pointed out, it's likely the mum didn't know her daughter's allergy was that severe. It can literally change to life threatening with one reaction and you have no way of knowing. Ordering a soya milk drink was a perfectly safe thing to do, and being given cows milk instead was negligence.

That must be so difficult@Runninghappy , I'm so sorry. I can't even imagine the stress for you or your DD.

Thank you.

I thought that plate didn't make sense!

So similar to putting them next to each other on a table/kitchen surface?

Totally normal Human error

the mum knew there was a risk and accepted the risk

With hindsight the mum also made a bad decision not accepting the dentist epi pen

No one would put cleaning liquid in a coffee because they do not make 90% of coffees using cleaning liquid during their working day. If they did, it would actually be quite easy to make that mistake.

This has me stumped too. It sounds like the Costa staff member said that there was milk in the hot chocolate and the mother agreed this was fine. It sounds like a half written article or they have missed out a further point which makes this relevant.

Easy enough for Akter/costa staff to say after and make it a he said/she said.

As well as allergy protocols are there protocols for very noisy environments where it's not always possible for people to hear exactly what's being said? You can have the best safety protocol in the world but what use is it without appropriate communication.

Agree.

Thing is, we have a tight labour market and hospitality jobs aren't particularly attractive. The pay isn't good, and flexibility is very limited because they have to be done in person at set times. That's not to say companies couldn't offer more and better training, but I think some of the posts on this thread are a bit optimistic about the workers that are actually available for jobs like this.

So was the staff member saying: 'hey I washed out the jug, but there's still dairy milk in this chocolate I just made' giving her the heads up that she had in fact used dairy and the mum, not understanding said cool?

Or was she saying: Hey you requested no dairy but the chocolate solution contains some milk. Is milk ok then?

People on the thread say Costa chocolate powder contains no milk so it was the former?

I had assumed the latter. I'm confused too.

Well maybe hospitality needs to pay more considering the life threatening nature of food safety. There at least needs to be one highly paid person who is fully trained and speaks fluent English, who they summon when a customer discloses an allergy.

You'd gave to pay me huge amounts to entice me to take random strangers very lives in my hands. Strangers who in some cases aren't even prepared to take the necessary cautions for themselves.

I've worked in customer facing roles. People do foolish things and make stupid irresponsible decisions but expect you to solve it all the time.

It's not fair frankly.

It would need to pay more, yes. Can't see any way round that.

If it doesn't do that but nonetheless carries significant expectations, it's likely to suffer the same problems as other low paid, high responsibility work like caring, nursery nursing, TAs etc. That is, staff shortages. High expectations and low wages are not a very popular combination when people have options.

Maybe enough is already being done for customer safety and we just have to accept errors will always be made. This is a very rare occurrence.

In this case the mum made catastrophic errors throughout by both ordering a drink with milk in (chocolate powder) and then not acting quickly enough with the epi pen offered.

No, in Costa a hot chocolate made with plant milk is vegan, so no milk in the powder.

True. But try to find people willing to work on coffee shop conditions. It's a lowclass job not a job people want.

The chocolate powder doesn't have milk in