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349 points zdw | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.412s | source
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forgotoldacc ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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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repeekad ◴[] No.45653159[source]
It’s not just save as many lives as possible at all costs, saving 20 kids but 2 will develop debilitating peanut allergies isn’t worth it. Progress must be done slowly ensuring no harm is done along the way.

Science failed here.

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1. jbstack ◴[] No.45653221[source]
What on earth are you saying? It's better to kill 20 children than to risk that 2 of them develop peanut allergies? I don't see how this can even begin to be an arguable position to take. And that's ignoring the fact that it isn't even a correct assertion in this case.
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2. repeekad ◴[] No.45653547[source]
They’re not mutually exclusive options, we can save the 20 kids safely while having a mindset that values doing no harm.

Telling anxious parents to have their kids avoid peanuts caused harm that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I guess it’s valuable to better understand allergies, but learning at others’ expense isn’t worth it.