Eat with care: Parents exercise extreme caution to ensure food safety for kids with allergies

GRAND FORKS, N.D. - When you have a child with a food allergy, you live with the fear that your child may eat or touch something that could cause a life-threatening reaction.
KariJo O’Keefe of Grand Forks knows this feeling firsthand. Her two young boys have food allergies.
Her oldest, 4-year-old Landon, has ended up in the local emergency room because he touched the same surface at church where some someone had eaten a dessert that contained peanuts, O’Keefe said.
Landon is also allergic to tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy, coconut, red dyes and carrageenan, a food additive.
“When you’re telling a family that their child has a food allergy, it will alter their whole life - everything they do,” Dr. Fatima Khan, an allergy and immunology specialist at Altru Health System in Grand Forks.
“Let’s say you go to a party where there’s a buffet,” she said. “Imagine if you didn’t know which one (of the foods) was the poison. You’re always going to have that fear that your child could eat something and could potentially die.
“You can see how scary that is for parents.”
Parents need to be concerned about potential exposure to allergens at day care centers, schools and restaurants, and whether their children’s caregivers know how to handle allergic reactions which could cause serious illness or death, she said.
“That’s how significant a problem it is.”
O’Keefe remembers “vividly” the first time Landon had an allergic reaction at about 13 months old.
Her family was enjoying a pontoon ride on a lake when her father gave Landon a tiny taste of a homemade dessert bar. The recipe for the bar included a quarter-cup of peanut butter.
“That small amount of peanut was enough to cause full body hives, agitation and diarrhea,” she said. “The hives were so gigantic they were melding together.
“We had no epi pens or anything with us; we were in the middle of nowhere.”
(An epi pen is an epinephrine auto-injector device used to stop an allergic reaction called anaphylaxis.)
Her uncle, a family physician, gave Landon a dose of children’s Benadryl which controlled the reaction, she said.
“It was scary, especially with the first baby.”
KariJo was no stranger to food allergies. She grew up with a corn allergy as well as more severe environmental allergies that struck in the spring and fall. She outgrew the corn and environmental allergies, but remains allergic to dairy, avocado and shellfish.
Growing up with allergies was “so hard,” she said. “There were a lot of tears.”
Rough start
On the night her second child, Luke, was born, he vomited “violently” after breastfeeding, she said.
Nurses pumped his stomach and explained to her that sometimes babies swallow fluid during birth.
“That answer satisfied me and I took him home and continued to nurse him,” she said.
But Luke’s vomiting continued.
“The first six weeks were terrible for my husband and I,” she said. “We felt helpless. It seemed like he never slept. When he did, he was constantly moving, as if in pain. When he was awake, he was crying.
“I had baby throw-up all over my house.”
She and her husband, Jon, brought Luke to a pediatrician, who prescribed a medication for gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD, but that didn’t help the vomiting, O’Keefe said.
She began to wonder if maybe he had a food allergy.
When Luke reached 6 weeks old--the earliest that skin testing for allergies can be conducted - his parents took him to Khan, who, after testing him, confirmed that Luke was allergic to dairy and soy.
Luke, who will be 2 in October, seems to be outgrowing the soy allergy, based on results of recent allergy testing, she said.
“Most parents find so much joy in feeding new foods and baby food to their babies. For a parent of a child with known severe food allergies, it’s a special type of living hell - if I may be so frank,” she wrote in an email. “The anxiety we felt before feeding him each new food was awful.”
As her boys grow, she worries about the possibility they will be bullied in school because of their food allergies, and the “rude comments” she has heard from other parents, she said.
‘Drastic lifestyle change’
She and husband have undergone “a drastic lifestyle change” to ensure the safety of the foods their family eats, she said.
“We can no longer eat anywhere we please. I have to call ahead and establish with the manager whether or not the restaurant will be able to handle our food allergies.”
There are only two that she and Jon consider to be “safe.”
At restaurants, she wipes the table, chairs and high chairs thoroughly with sanitizing wipes.
“I’ve gotten the ‘you’re crazy’ looks from other customers regularly,” she said. “I wish I could tell them, ‘My kid could die from eating on or touching a contaminated surface.’ ”
When grocery shopping, O’Keefe reads product labels, checking for ingredients such as peanuts and milk.
“I have to read the label, right down to the type of baking soda and vanilla used,” she said.
Although the law doesn’t require it, more food companies are beginning to indicate on labels that their products may contain certain allergens.
An item could look safe but it may not be, she said.
“I call companies to be sure they haven’t changed their production practices, making sure (production) lines aren’t shared with our allergy foods. That’s a routine thing that I do.”
Having to prepare everything from scratch “has been overwhelming and extremely time consuming (but necessary),” she said. “We have to be very careful about who drinks what and who eats what.”
“Each child has his own kind of sippy cup so that my husband and I don’t mistakenly give the wrong liquid to the wrong kid.”
They all wash their hands very carefully after eating, she said.
Potential danger at daycare
Keeping their sons safe at daycare and preschool is “nerve wracking,” O’Keefe said. “We can only send them to nut-free daycare (facilities), but there’s always the possibility that another child will have eaten a peanut butter sandwich before attending.”
Grandparents and everyone who takes care of Landon and Luke have been trained in the use of an epi pen and what signs to watch for and know the proper Benadryl dosage to give, she said.
“After a full year of (adjusting to food allergies), we’ve finally fallen into somewhat of a routine.
“Landon loves to remind us about checking the milk twice and washing our hands,” she said. “He can also tell people what foods he is allergic to.”
“While most kids start by learning words like ‘cat’ or ‘hat,’ we begin with major food allergens. He can pick out the words ‘peanut,’ ‘soy’ and ‘milk.’”