Grant: CIHR Journalism Award

I was fortunate, as a child, that I liked peanut butter. Having seven children to pack off to school with lunches each morning, it was about the only nutritious substance my mother had the time or money to slather on our sandwiches. As I recall, many of the other mothers in my Orangeville Ont. grade school followed the same strategy. Yet from K through 8, I am certain that these midday staples didn't cause anything more serious than lunch bag letdown for any of my classmates. As the father of an 8-year-old boy today, however, I would no more send my son to school with a peanut butter sandwich than a switchblade. Indeed, we have to scour the ingredients of any food we put in his lunch to make certain there's not even a trace of peanut in the mix. The rise of food allergies, especially nut allergies, has become a paramount concern for Canadian parents and school officials in the span of a generation. Likewise, the incidents of asthma have skyrocketed during that time. Why is this? As a medical and science writer for more than a decade, I have not seen any extensive, solid reporting on the reasons behind these epidemiological shifts. Are they problems that were drastically underreported before? Or under recognized? Or, is there some combination of environmental contaminants, demographic changes, or other factors that can account for the apparent increases? Alternately, is the fear out of proportion with the true scope of the problems? How widespread and numerous are food allergies and asthma cases among today's children? These are the questions we will look to answer in this series of stories.