The peanut allergy epidemic

I am currently reading The Peanut Allergy Epidemic: What's causing it and how to stop it by Heather Fraser, a writer and historian who lives in Toronto and is the mother of a child who suffers from food allergies including peanuts. The author argues very convincingly that the huge increase in the number of children with potentially-fatal peanut allergies is due to the use of peanut oil in the vaccinations they received as babies.

A disclaimer: I am not a scientist and I have no way of evaluating some of the stuff the author writes. In fact, I would be very interested in reading a counter-argument if someone could draw it to my attention.

The author states that it is well known and acknowledged among scientists that vaccines can create various kinds of allergies, depending on the ingredients. Over the years, all kinds of ingredients have been used in vaccines, including glycerin, gelatin, cottonseed oil, and - ta da - peanut oil. However, pharmaceutical companies are not required to disclose vaccine ingredients, so it's impossible to determine who got what when. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that peanut oil has been used in some vaccines over the past 20 years or so.

There appears to be no question that allergies can be caused by vaccinations. For example, the book mentions an outbreak of gelatin allergy in Japan in the early nineties - with the outbreak being traced to the inclusion of gelatin in a new diphtheria-tetanus-ocellar-pertussis vaccine, as well as a measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. As a result, vaccine makers removed gelatin from these vaccines, and the incidence of anaphalaxis dropped accordingly. 

At present, there is no known way of ameliorating peanut allergy once it is present. However, if the vaccine hypothesis is correct, it should be possible to reduce the future incidence of peanut allergies by removing peanut oil from vaccines. 

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