The very worst fear of every parent who has a child with a life-threatening food allergy is sending him or her off to school for the first time, and if your child was among the one in twelve children who suffer from the most common allergies, where even the simplest of everyday foods could potentially be life-threatening, it would be your fear too.
One of most problematic is an allergy to peanuts. Another huge problem that schools are finding now is allergies to very basic foods such as milk and eggs, milk being one of the very freely-given drinks in most schools as we were growing up.
The seriousness of any life-threatening illness has to be addressed by all schools, wherever they are. Unfortunately, that is sometimes not the case. If staff are untrained or inexperienced they can be just as much of a threat to the child’s life as the allergy.
The fear of the parent and the school for these children is that they go into anaphylactic shock.  Anaphylaxis is a potentially life-threatening condition that can be triggered by ingesting, inhaling or even touching the tiniest protein particle of an allergic substance. Peanuts, tree nuts, sesame seeds, fish and shellfish are the foods most often implicated in anaphylaxis.
Symptoms usually appear within minutes and last for several hours. These can include asthma attacks, skin rashes, swelling, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea. Immediate administration of adrenaline in the form of an Epipen auto-injector, and oral antihistamines, help to control episodes.
It is estimated now that about 1.5 million people in the UK alone suffer from food allergies. This includes 8 per cent of the total child population and just over 2 per cent of the adult population. This is a three hundred per cent rise since 1990. It is seen that some of the allergies that children have disappear as the child grows up.
Children who are most at risk are those where one or both parents are atopic (where there is a tendency to suffer from an allergic condition).
Food allergies do seem to be a modern phenomenon. Until 1990, peanut allergy was rare, although now it is thought that a staggering one in fifty children is allergic to nuts. Food allergy basically means that the immune system is over reacting to a tiny protein called an allergen, which is present in a food. This allergen causes a response in the antibody immunoglobulin E (igE), which the body then overproduces. Once the igE antibodies see the enemy protein, they try to bind to the mast cells, which they would normally sit quite happily on. The mast cells, under duress, burst and release lots of immune messengers, such as histamine and other chemicals – ostensibly to protect the body. Instead, these chemicals trigger tissue inflammation and swelling, which can cause symptoms that affect the respiratory system, the skin or the cardiovascular system.
Ninety per cent of food allergies are igE-related and reactions are immediate. Symtoms include angioedema (eyes, lip and tongue swelling) asthmatic symptoms, such as wheezing and breathlessness, acute urticaria (hives or skin rashes), oral allergy syndrome, diarrhoea and vomiting. In extreme cases, and within minutes, it can cause anaphylaxis.

Nobody yet has been able to identify why the numbers of children with food allergies has risen. It seems that the more of a certain food that is consumed in a country, the more the incident rate of food allergy grows with that product. For example, in Poland, the highest number of allergies to food is to poppy seed because it is a widely-used ingredient in the main diet. In China, the highest numbers for food allergies are related to rice, the main part of the Chinese diet. In Scandinavian countries, the highest numbers of children with food allergies, are allergic to fish, again another main part of the diet.
The good news is that nine out of ten children will outgrow their allergies by the time they are seven or eight years old. Peanut and fish allergies tend to persist, although according to a recent study, about 20 per cent of children under four with these allergies did outgrow them. After eight years of age, though, the chance of outgrowing these allergies is pretty small.
So, what can schools do to curb the problems at school? There are certain measures that most head teachers put in place when a child with food allergies has been identified, but unfortunately, for some children, it is of no help once they have spent a couple of days in the hospital because those measures are usually only put in place once an episode has been seen for the first time by the school. Most good schools already have procedures in place to cope with children with allergies, and you must learn to ask when you are interviewing the school.
High-risk situations include children’s parties, picnics and eating out. Equally important is to inform the school and the children in the class your child is in so they can be requested not to bring into school the product that your child has the allergy to.