Eating out can be risky for people with food allergies

By The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

LITTLE ROCK — Don't offer Dorothy Miles a peanut butter sandwich.

It has nothing to do with the peanut-product salmonella outbreak as of late.

It has everything to do with a lifelong allergy to peanuts.

For Miles and more than 12 million Americans who have food allergies - that's 4 percent of the population - dining out could be a game of restaurant Russian roulette, features writer Eric E. Harrison tells us in Tuesday's Style section.

Miles, a microbiologist who works as a research associate at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, also has sharp, though usually nonlife-threatening, reactions to peanut-related legumes - peas and beans, including soy products.

Miles doesn't even have to make contact with an actual nut to react to it.

"All I have to do is touch something - the table, or a piece of silverware" that has come in contact with a nut, and bang."

About 6.9 million Americans are allergic to seafood, and about 3.3 million are allergic to peanuts or tree nuts, according to the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, a Fairfax, Va.-based nonprofit organization. The network says it doesn't have reliable figures for other common food allergens, which include milk (commonly diagnosed as lactose intolerance), eggs, wheat (gluten), soy, fish and shellfish.

Food-allergy-related reactions result in an estimated 30,000 emergency-room visits and between 150 and 200 deaths each year, the network says.

Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.

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