I wonder why the old advice was being given if it was so wrong? If nobody understood what to do, shouldn't there have been no advice instead of something harmful?
replies(9):
They know that skin and mucosa sensitization can occur in response to allergens.
A reasonable hypothesis is that there’s some boot-up process with the immune system that needs to occur before anything happens. The kids are dying today. “Avoid the thing that can cause sensitization” is a conservative position.
It is unusual that it should have been opposite and that oral exposure induces tolerance. It’s the fog of war.
The standard conservative intervention has helped in the past: I’m pretty sure seatbelts didn’t have strong mortality data before they were implemented. If it had turned out that more people were killed by seatbelts that trapped them in vehicles it would make for a similar story. I think they also got rid of all blood from donors who were men who have sex with men during the initial stages of the HIV pandemic (no evidence at the time).
Edit for response to comment below since rate-limited:
Wait, I thought it was on the order of ~150/year people dying from food anaphylaxis though I didn’t research that strongly. It was off my head. If you’re right, the conservative advice seems definitely far too much of an intervention and I agree entirely.
What? That's insane, 4-5 kids were dying a year. The whole thing was mass hysteria, that then started to create the problem when there had been none.