The death of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse was undoubtedly a tragedy. Her story can be simply retold. She had a nut allergy, and ate an artichoke, olive and tapenade baguette at Heathrow Airport in July 2016, believing that it did not contain nuts. On the flight she went into cardiac arrest, and despite having two EpiPen injections (adrenaline) she died the same day. The baguette contained sesame seeds, an ingredient apparently not listed on the packaging.
At the recent inquest into Natasha's death the court focussed on food labelling. Pret A Manger did not label its baguettes as containing sesame seeds even though there had been six allergic reaction cases in the previous year. So the family is now campaigning for a change in food labelling laws.
An allergy is simply explained. "An allergy occurs when our immune system overreacts to what is normally a harmless substance, and triggers what, for the healthy human body, is an inappropriate and unnecessary response."
To eat a few sesame seeds, and die as a result, is most certainly "an inappropriate and unnecessary response", so whilst it is appropriate to look at food labelling, it is surely more important to discuss why Natasha's immune system, designed to defend and protect itself from attack from foreign substances, should react to a food it should have been able to eat in complete safety.
At the recent inquest into Natasha's death the court focussed on food labelling. Pret A Manger did not label its baguettes as containing sesame seeds even though there had been six allergic reaction cases in the previous year. So the family is now campaigning for a change in food labelling laws.
An allergy is simply explained. "An allergy occurs when our immune system overreacts to what is normally a harmless substance, and triggers what, for the healthy human body, is an inappropriate and unnecessary response."
To eat a few sesame seeds, and die as a result, is most certainly "an inappropriate and unnecessary response", so whilst it is appropriate to look at food labelling, it is surely more important to discuss why Natasha's immune system, designed to defend and protect itself from attack from foreign substances, should react to a food it should have been able to eat in complete safety.
Allergy has become an epidemic in recent years. I have written about this in 'Epidemic of Chronic Disease', and in this blog from October 2012.
"According to the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology's report, published in July 2007, "the prevalence and incidence of allergic disease have markedly increased over the past 50 years", and that evidence presented to the Committee showed that "an increasing prevalence of asthma was first noted in studies of Birmingham school children, starting in the mid 1950s," and that since then "the prevalence of asthma and wheezing appears to have doubled "approximately every 14 years" until the mid 1990s. It added that the trends for other disorders such as hay fever and eczema are similar."
The 2004 report showed the scale of the "allergy epidemic" - that 39% of children and 30% of adults had been diagnosed with one or more of asthma, eczema and hayfever; and 38% of children and 45% of adults had experienced symptoms of these disorders during the preceding 12 months. Yet since then the allergy epidemic has continued to grow!
AND NO-ONE APPEARS TO WANT TO ASK THE OBVIOUS QUESTION - WHY?
In the current debate about Natasha, no one seems to want to ask why she had this allergy in the first place. The cause of her death was her allergy - it was not a sandwich containing sesame seed, this was just the trigger. After all, we should all be able to eat sesame seeds without such a reaction!
The answer is agonisingly simple. One of the main causes of the allergy epidemic, if not the main cause, are pharmaceutical drugs. This link lists the drugs known to cause allergy - including painkilling drugs, antibiotic drugs, sleeping pills, and in particular, childhood vaccinations and the plethora of drugs that 'work' by interfering with our immune system.
Does conventional medicine know about this? Apparently not, although perhaps more pertinent questions might be "does it want to know", and "does it want us to know?" This is what the NHS Choices website tell us about the cause of allergies.
"Allergies occur when the body's immune system reacts to a particular substance as though it's harmful. It's not clear why this happens.....
"The number of people with allergies is increasing every year. The reasons for this are not understood....."
So conventional medicine claims not to know - even when its medical textbooks, the doctors bibles like the British National Formulary and MIMS, very clearly provides the evidence for the link with pharmaceutical drugs!
There is a fundamental problem with this. If conventional medicine refuses to acknowledge the serious side effects of pharmaceutical drugs, if doctors won't tell patients about the harm they can cause, if our mainstream media decides not to ask important questions about iatrogenic disease, there will be no solution to this problem, or any other health problem.
The campaign being waged by Natasha's parents will be doomed to failure because it does not address the most important question of all. Why was Natasha body allergic to what should be a harmless food?
Before it is possible to reach a solution for any problem it is first necessary to know what is causing the problem. Identify the wrong cause and a solution is not possible.
Allergy Treatment
And there is another problem. Where should parents be looking for safe and effective treatment for allergy? Natasha's father used two EpiPen injections, and they failed. I have written about the conventional treatment of allergy - the antihistamine drugs, the steroids, the decongestants, the 'Leukotriene receptor antagonists', and of course immunotherapy (playing around with our immune system). In the same link I have written about the homeopathic treatment of allergy, which is altogether more effective, free of serious adverse drug reactions, and safer.
Indeed, conventional medicine has proven that homeopathy is an effective treatment for allergy, and nut allergy in particular. In January 1914 the mainstream media heralded a new and successful treatment for peanut allergy. This from a BBC article.
"Doctors say a potential treatment for peanut allergy has transformed the lives of children taking part in a large clinical trial. The 85 children had to eat peanut protein every day - initially in small doses, but ramped up during the study. The finding, published in the Lancet, suggest 84% of allergic children could eat the equivalent of five peanuts a day after six months".
As I said at the time, this is a treatment based on the principle of 'like (in small quantities) curing like'. It is, in other words, based on the principles of homeopathy! Whilst Homeopathy prefers to use peanuts in potency (in high dilution), these researchers used minute doses of peanut itself. This is probably not as safe as homeopathy, and probably produces results more slowly, but it is nonetheless homeopathy!
Yet in the years since that research was heralded as a breakthrough treatment conventional medicine is still not using. So perhaps we should all be asking why!
But then, in matters of health, the right questions are rarely asked. This is why the allergy epidemic continues to grow, year by year, and why so many more 'Natasha's' are likely to die. Her mother was quoted as saying that "nobody else should ever have to suffer such a needless death". No-one is likely to disagree. Hopefully the food industry will eventually get its labelling right.
I am less optimistic that conventional medicine will ever admit that pharmaceutical drugs are a significant cause of allergy. And it is this that will be the basis of future tragedies.
