Mary Young* knows all too well about the problems with food bans. Her five-year-old son, Noah, has an anaphylactic allergy to peanuts. He was accidentally exposed twice in his supposedly peanut-free daycare, once when he was three and again when he was four. ?It started as hives and then got worse and worse,? recalls Young. ?We ended up at the ER.?
Peanut and tree nut bans are common in daycare facilities and elementary schools in Canada as a solution to protect students with severe, sometimes life-threatening, anaphylactic allergies. However, new research from the University of Alberta argues that it?s time to talk about the best way to respond to allergies in schools. In some cases, that could mean putting peanuts back on the menu.
Clearly, kids with anaphylactic allergies need to be accommodated at school so that they can be safe, and it?s up to the school to determine how it?s best to do that. In fact, schools are legally required to do so because an anaphylactic allergy is considered a disability under both the federal Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and provincial human rights law, writes University of Alberta law professor Eric M. Adams in a paper he co-authored earlier this year. However, Adams and his co-authors Blake Murdoch and Timothy Caulfield say that blanket bans do not appear to be legally required and it might be time to look for other solutions. ?It may have seemed, to many schools, that having banned the substance, they were now done with this i...