To be laughing at this?

[Ilovecaindingle]

My ds12 has just started a new school and has his first science lesson today. We were catching up on his day and he said they had to do an experiment. The experiment was to heat a peanut up to a certain temp and record when it burnt etc. But due to school allergy advice they aren't allowed to use a peanut.

So he used a Wotsit instead!!
Now I am def not laughing regarding allergy advice obviously but what things do kids accept as normal now that didn't occur to us /happen when we went to school?

And nobody I can think of in my class with SN. One with behavioural problems (I'd say some form of anger management), he came from a DV background, his mum often had bruising on her face. Went on to do drugs in a big way. I hadn't thought about him for a very long time, I hope he's ok.

Possibly a couple in my year with AS. Possibly. I'm not really in any position to be able to tell, they were just different to most of us. Although, I was incredibly shy, came across as haughty, was v badly bullied. Someone else would probably be remembering the weird stuck up girl with all the allergies and bad asthma.

I'm convinced my childhood had a lot to do with my asthma, it's definitely anxiety related, as well as allergy, and I have v disordered breathing.

I'm 57. There were no children in my year with allergies or asthma, from when I was 8 until I left at 18. I remember one girl with eczema. I only ever met one child with asthma, and she lived up the road from my grandmother's house - only saw her when we went to stay there on 'holiday'.

Not that I'm down playing any such allergies. Frightening, seen the effects, not experienced but must be horrible not to be able to breathe. Fairly basic human right, breathing

I wonder if stress has anything to do with it. Stress affects the immune system, and I think our children are under a ridiculous amount of pressure to perform. They're constantly tested, they're under pressure to go to school when ill, we've lost the culture of convalescing, andbtheyre wxposed to a lot of what would have been deemed 'adult' stuff when we were kids.

Does stress magnify autism? As in would an autistic child be worse if they were subjected to long term levels of external stress? I wonder if the levels have always been there, but the children who would now be diagnosed were able to cope because they didn't have as much pressure. Or is that me being ignorant - many apologies if I am, I'm sort of thinking out loud here.

Yeah, it's kind of ironic not being very good at something as basic as breathing. I'm doing Buteyko in my lung physio, ie I'm learning how to breathe. FFS.

My DS has an anaphylactic nut allergy as I had many MC I was advised not to eat nuts when pregnant, I wonder if that is a contributory factor

He also has ASD and won't eat many foods.
As part of ASD there are sensory processing problems an allergy could be considered to be a sensory reaction that's inappropriate.

I was thinking about why nerds often have allergies.

I'm quite nerdy 🤓

niffler I think asthma is physical not physiological, the rest of it is definitely overcome-able. In your head, if you like. But anxiety rarely wants to leave.

It's both, I can literally think myself into an asthma attack :(

You mention autism. I think the wonderful thing about autism is the total ability to screen. I don't know if forcing autistic kids to do normal* stuff helps them in the slightest, but I don't know a thing about it.

Must sleep, annoying, this is quite intriguing.

Ah niffler you allow anxiety to do a number on you. Got it

Sorry niffler the comment wasn't about the sleeping, the previous idea :)

I'm 51 and knew two asthmatics as a child: my DB, and a younger boy who died of an attack. One of my closest friends had an allergy to certain food colourants and would swell up if she encountered them accidentally. I don't think anyone worried about anaphylaxis, but she took damned good care not to ingest those things all the same. Other SNs were undoubtedly treated as misbehaviour or lack of intellect.

Araminta99 Completely agree. Dirt and germs are good...... Build up the immune system.

Kids should be exposed to as much as possible.

I think there was a very sad case in ?late 80s of a girl who died from anaphylactic reaction to traces of peanut on a lemon meringue pie. I think that played a part in the public knowledge of just how serious nut allergies can be, and it boosted pressure on manufacturers to mark products containing nuts.

I reckon water consumption has changed a lot since I was a child. We rarely took drinks with us anywhere and I don't recall having them at school except at lunchtime, whereas these days children seem to need one about their person at all times. My kids shed them at an alarming rate too, we get through loads.

Read a paper a few years back about globalisation and how the importing of food has given rise to allergies-we eat meat / wheat fed on molecules that our digestive systems can't process so they reject. Plus antibiotics in food chain / reduction of resistance to bugs through better hygiene etc. So viruses that'd have been wiped out by the cold now thrive in air con / heated places, add people coming here with other bugs etc. That we don't have immunity to- plus pollution / extra cars on road you can Sed how this would happen.
My sister was anaphylactic to certain foods in the 80's. My dad (born in the 30's) had chronic asthma. It's a variety of things - done ethnic groups don't get certain illnesses (anecdotally an irish pal married to a Jamaican was told her coeliac wouldn't be passed on and that her scan which predicted CF for one of her children was nothing to worry about as Jamaicans don't get Cf?)

I teach in a school where we recently had some allergy training from a specialist. He mentioned that the advice from the late 80s to stop kids from having ANY contact with peanuts, and for pregnant women not to touch them at all, was wrong, and actually created more problems, so that there are now more people with allergies.

I also suspect that many of us were just blissfully ignorant unless we were close to someone with an issue. Such is childhood.

Mid 60s here. I don't recall any allergies at all at high school in the 60s.

One girl was permanently off-games due to a 'bad heart' after having had rheumatic fever (i don't mean it was a pretend bad heart, just that i'm not sure of the exact details, or indeed what a bad heart is).

Another girl had had polio and had a very badly deformed leg as a result.
I seem to recall a couple of girls might have had asthma but i don't ever remember seeing anyone use an inhaler. There were also one or two girls with epilepsy, which seemed to be untreated.

Interesting cross section of responses. I'm 43, for reference.

How much of the current issues is due to increased pollution? Sounds lefty I know. I'm not a lefty. But people are not well, in large cities. I wouldn't live in London if you paid me.

More and more research becoming available regarding leaky gut syndrome causing all sorts of auto immune issues (asthma, eczema, food allergies, fibromyalgia etc) as well as causing asd symptoms. Natasha Campbell-McBride's book "Gut and Psychology Syndrome" is well worth reading. If her hypothesis is correct (and my application of her strategy would suggest that it is) then it is absolutely attributable to huge envrinomental and dietary changes post WW2. This would affect gut-biome for several generations causing the increase in diagnoses we are all seeing anecdotally.

environmental.

In the 80s I was at school with a child with epilepsy and two with egg allergies.

I was at school in the 70s and 80s and I knew several kids with inhalers. I also remember there being several accommodations for kids at guide camp for allergy and asthma reasons. I remember three kids being rushed to hospital over the course of my time at school with allergic reactions, and one kid in my year with asthma died over the summer holidays when I was about 13.

I understand that diagnoses have increased, and medical studies show it's because of better diagnosis and an increase in incidence. There are quite a few good theories gaining ground (and evidence) about why incidence has increased. But I also wonder if some kids with severe problems were just excluded from main stream schooling too, making the incidence appear less to those in schools, but only because the school student body was skewed to exclude them.