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60k kids have avoided peanut allergies due to 2015 advice, study finds

(www.cbsnews.com)
349 points zdw | 3 comments | 21 Oct 25 03:53 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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forgotoldacc ◴[21 Oct 25 05:20 UTC] No.45652698[source]▶
There was a period of a few decades (I guess still ongoing, really) where parents sheltered their kids from everything. Playing in the dirt, peanuts, other allergens. It seems like all it's done is make people more vulnerable as adults. People assume babies are super fragile and delicate, and in many ways they are, but they also bounce back quickly.

Maybe part of it is a consequence of the risks of honey, which can actually spawn camp infants with botulism. But it seems that fear spread to everything.

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jstummbillig ◴[21 Oct 25 06:08 UTC] No.45652940[source]▶
Not to confuse things: There quite simply is a long list of things that can kill an infant and we get increasingly better evidence for what's on there and what is not. Avoiding death at all cost is ludicrous, but for a child born in the 1950s in high income countries the mortality rate was ~5%. 1 in 20 kids dead before the age of 5. For contrast, now it's closer to 1 in 300. That's not a coincidence but a lot of compounding things we understand better today.

Are there missteps? Certainly. Figuring out what is effective, what has bad secondary effects (fragility, allergies etc) and what is simply wrong is an ongoing effort and that's great, but less dying is a pretty nice baseline and progress on that front is inarguable.

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staplers ◴[21 Oct 25 06:17 UTC] No.45652976[source]▶
I wish society at large could be on par with this nuanced and rational opinion. I miss when science was celebrated.
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1. aeternum ◴[21 Oct 25 06:31 UTC] No.45653054[source]▶
Rational and science might be pretty far apart. Flying a key in a thunderstorm for example isn't the most rational decision. Neither scraping open your family's arms and applying cowpox pus.

Pretty irrational, but definitely celebrated.. eventually

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2. sokoloff ◴[21 Oct 25 07:15 UTC] No.45653282[source]▶
Risky and irrational are different in my mind.

If the best available means to perform an experiment carries some risk, it could still be entirely rational to do it rather than forfeit the knowledge gained from the experiment.

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3. aeternum ◴[21 Oct 25 22:26 UTC] No.45662515[source]▶
Rational/risky experiments are illegal currently.

For example take the famous mask debate. It could easily be solved by having volunteers willing to stand in a room with people with covid at various distance, each using randomized masks/no mask. There would be plenty of volunteers for such a study but there's no way it would be approved.

The FDA doesn't count lives lost due to inaction and slow approval of new drugs and treatments. As Munger always said "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." By any rational calculus, that one Thalidomide win by the FDA has caused incalculable death, pain and suffering by pushing out the timeline on not only recently discovered cures but all those built on top.

Imagine for example the number of lives saved if GLP-1 was purchasable over the counter in the 1990s when it was first discovered.