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?

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.

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

100% agree with this though

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?

It's both, but more so for the current passengers. While not thorough, they do clean the planes between flights, about as well as they clean movie theatres between viewings, maybe a bit better.

With previous occupants, the damage is done, nothing can change the fact that they might have contaminated an area that wasn't properly cleaned, but limiting additional contamination is the only mitigation available for this lady, besides traveling in an N95, wearing gloves and other PPE, which may be a better option than buying up all the offending material.

I can sympathize with her plight, but I understand that not everyone will; and asking people to be cautious of their surface contamination... Well, you might as well ask them to will themselves through the air to their destination unaided by any machine. IMO, most average people don't understand surface contamination, and by proxy, won't participate in such restrictions. It's not something that most people need to, or choose to think about.

I don't begrudge the person for doing what they did, they have a medical issue that nobody took seriously enough. I get it, but I'm sure more than a few passengers were salty about not being able to get peanuts... No pun in tended.

There's also the contamination of the flight assistants, someone eating peanuts and having a beverage, contaminates the beverage container with peanut oil, which is collected by the attendant, whose hands are now contaminated, even if they ate no peanuts, who then serves the person with severe allergies, contaminating their food or beverages with the peanut oils, causing them to have a anaphylactic reaction, and potentially die as a result.

Exposure through a chain of contacts is hard to trace sometimes and for the most part, people don't think about these things. I know that after COVID, I do what I can to touch as little as possible in public places. I don't want your germs, or the cold, or the flu, or COVID, or anything else the random strangers that previously came through may have had and transferred to whatever I'm touching. No thanks.