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

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.

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.

I think most of the change in death rate is improved medicine (and maybe wealth too – plenty of people in the US in the 50s were very poor by modern standards) rather than parents knowing about many potentially harms. (Maybe I’m wrong? Happy to be corrected here)

Vaccinations and better antibiotics reduced death rates a lot, but in 1950 accidents were still 30% of the death rate for children, killing 5 times as many children than die today for all causes.