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.

Large scale antibiotic production wasn't until the 40s in the US, maybe a while to spread to all other wealthy countries. Was that the main factor?

Quick look into it, in the 50s:

- Before the age of 1, top cause of death were defects (prematurity/immaturity, birth injuries) and congenital deformations.

- Age 1-4 it was accidents (e.g., drownings, burns, traffic) followed by influenza/pneumonia.