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Woman with severe allergy ‘left with no choice’ but to buy every packet of peanuts on flight
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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I feel bad for her but I have to wonder, how does this person function on a day to day basis? If their allergy is so severe that other people eating peanuts around her would harm her, how does she leave the house? How did she navigate the airport?
Peanuts are not ubiquitous in public. Being near several people eating them in a fairly enclosed space is very different than walking through and airport and someone 25 feet away has a bag of peanuts.
The air within an airplane cabin is recirculated every five or ten minutes. A real severe peanut allergy would be triggered by anyone on the plane eating peanuts.
Yeah I had that thought too but if this were the case, would you take a life threatening risk that no one else on the plane has peanuts? Wouldn't you drive instead? Or take a means of public transportation where they don't regularly sell your allergen?
That's not necessarily feasible. Maybe she has a schedule? Doesn't have a car? Doesn't have a license?
Also, some reactions are uncomfortable but not deadly. I have an anaphylactic allergy to tree nuts, as in, all true nuts (as peanuts are a legume, i'm fine with them). However, I've never had an anaphylactic reaction, though I was prescribed an EpiPen and told it could become worse with no warning. I get oral itchiness, stinging lips and mouth, heartburn, acid reflux, and diarrhea from actually eating nuts. I'm not sure what it is like for people who are sensitive to the airborne level. It might just resemb le environmental allergies like sneezing, red eyes and so forth. And if you do have to use an EpiPen, it's painful to inject and then you have to go to the hospital afterwards. Not certain death, again, but uncomfortable and inconvenient.
I imagine she navigated those things with great difficulty and made the best decisions she could. She, like any other person with a medical condition or disability, exists in a world that usually will be hostile to her survival. Yet she must still exist within it. Sometimes people have to do things like take flights and rarely can someone afford to take measures that would best protect them (like a private flight or something in this case). Sounds like she didn't want to announce her private medical information to everyone around her so she did what she could to keep safe, buy all the peanuts. Ideally she wouldn't have to, peanut allergies are pretty well known and if we cared about increasing access for people not having peanuts for sale on planes is a pretty simple step. Until then people will keep being put into scenarios like this then scrutinized for the choices they make.
She claims she offered to tell the people around her not to buy them but the airline refused. The airline says they had agreed to do that but she decided to buy them all anyway. So it wasn’t about giving up private medical information (which wouldn’t make much sense anyway since she announced it to the world through this article). There’s also the fact that you’re very rarely “forced” to fly anywhere, especially in Europe. I just checked Google Maps and a flight from London to Düsseldorf is a little over an hour. There are train options for about 5 and half hours. That’s obviously a pretty big difference, but definitely workable if the allergy is really that severe. There’s also the fact she could’ve called ahead of time and asked about options instead of trying to strongarm the flight attendants into doing what she wanted.
And yeah, it wouldn’t be that difficult to not sell peanuts but that’s not the only thing people are allergic too. Unless they were going to not sell any snacks and not allow any outside food, it’d be impossible to prevent all allergens. That’s one of those things that the only possible solution is the person with the disorder to do their best to mitigate exposure, which means making sacrifices like taken a few trains for 6 hours instead of a convenient flight. There’s lots of people that due to various restrictions can’t always take the most convenient option.
She did actually agree to have that information shared with the other passengers and then still bought all the peanuts. I'm not saying she's faking her allergy or something, I'm trying to wrap my head around her train of thought here. You can also take a car, a train, a bus, all means of transportation where the transport company doesn't sell you peanuts. Yeah it's less convenient but shit man, it won't kill you.
100% agree with this though
A quick bit of googling indicates this was probably an Airbus 320 which another Google shows is about 123 feet long. Being generous and allowing 20 foot for cabin, loos, etc, does this mean her whole life she's never been within 100 foot of any nut?
I guess I sort of understand, this is an enclosed space with recycled AC, but it just seems unlikely that if it was this severe she'd take a life threatening risk like this. Right?