Some US schools are banning nuts from their premises to try to protect children with allergies, and in the most extreme case a school bus was allegedly evacuated because someone spotted a peanut on the vehicle's floor, see here.
Seems to me a classic case of focusing on the hazard rather than the risk. Only 150 people in the US die every year of any type of food allergy (so nut intolerance will be responsible for only some of those), while around 250 die from choking on their food and around 42,000 are killed in car accidents.
By concentrating on the severity of the potential reaction among those with allergies, rather than the probability of anyone actually being in contact with the allergen (did they think the peanut was going to leap off the floor and go for a child's throat?) people are bound to over-react.
I could see the point when the airlines swapped their little bags of nuts for biscuits; all those little bags being opened at once propelling nut dust into a confined cabin would definitely pose some risk of a sensitised passenger going into anaphylactic shock one day.
But this seems silly.
Louis
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