Food Allergies Can Kill: Two Stories That Prove It

Food allergies are severe, and people who have never experienced one often don't grasp how fast they can kill. Two families' stories make the point better than any statistic.

Katelyn Carlson was 13 when she died of anaphylaxis in December 2010. A seventh-grader at Chicago's Edison Regional Gifted Center, she ate Chinese food ordered for a class party — food her teacher had reportedly asked the restaurant to prepare without peanut products. Lab tests later found trace peanut in the meal. Her death led to change: partly in response, the Chicago Public Schools board voted to stock EpiPens in schools, and Illinois passed a law allowing schools to keep undesignated epinephrine on hand (Allergic Living).

Natalie Giorgi was 13 when she died in July 2013. Camping with her family at Camp Sacramento, she took a single bite of a Rice Krispies treat that turned out to contain peanut butter, and spat it out. Twenty minutes later the reaction cascaded: vomiting, a swollen throat, cardiac arrest. Her father, a physician, administered three successive doses of epinephrine. It wasn't enough. Her parents' advocacy after the tragedy — including a multimillion-dollar settlement with the city and California's Natalie Giorgi Sunshine Act, signed in 2019 — pushed schools and camps to take allergy readiness seriously (Allergic Living, SnackSafely).

These are not freak events. Anaphylaxis from food allergies is widely reported to cause an estimated 150 to 200 deaths in the United States every year, and thousands more end up in emergency rooms.

Most people with little or no experience of food allergies scoff at the fuss — at the ingredient questions, the restaurant negotiations, the EpiPen drills. But the fuss is the point. I learned it myself a few years ago: I'm allergic to soy products, and even after explaining it to my relatives, they paid no notice. I ate a chapatti whose flour had soy flour mixed in. An hour after feeling perfectly normal, I had severe diarrhea and vomiting; by the end of the hour, it was difficult to walk or talk. That was with a relatively mild exposure. Anaphylaxis moves faster and doesn't negotiate.

The practical side is unglamorous but clear, and food-allergy groups like FARE say the same things year after year: know your triggers and avoid them strictly; work with your doctor on an emergency care plan; carry your medication everywhere; use it at the first sign of a reaction — delay is what killed Natalie Giorgi; and get to an emergency room afterward even if the reaction seems to have passed.

Take the questions seriously when someone asks what's in the food. It may be the least annoying thing about the meal.