HALLOWEEN FOOD SAFETY

It’s Halloween this weekend, and parents need to take extreme care with Halloween food safety. Specifically, parents of children with food allergies need to take extra caution.
Halloween food safety is a particularly important consideration for parents of children with allergies. Lurking inside that harmless looking cupcake or chocolate bar could be ingredients harmful to people with allergies.

Many parents don’t worry too much about Halloween food safety since raising kids with food allergies makes them fairly savvy when it comes to reading labels.
But kids will be kids, and a tempting taste on the trick or treat route, without appropriate medicine, could spell disaster.
7 year old Nicholas Mikolajczak has reason to take great care with Halloween food safety. He is allergic to peanuts, a common, and often hidden ingredient in candy. “It’s a very serious allergy. He has an anaphylactic reaction if he eats peanuts,” says Sandy Mikolajczak, Nicholas’ mom.
For kids like Nicholas, strict avoidance of the offending food is the only way to ensure Halloween food safety. It’s the only a severe allergic reaction to food can be prevented.
Dr. Clifford Bassett, an allergist at Long Island College Hospital, says, “The FDA has said about 25 percent of foods are not either correctly labeled or not labeled at all. And therefore it’s important to be very careful when it comes to Halloween food safety. People have to be label detectives, and get that magnifying glass and flashlight out come Halloween night, and look at each of the ingredients in food products.”
To ensure Halloween food safety, parents of food-allergic children must read every label on each piece of candy in their child's Halloween bag. A product's ingredients can change at any time without warning, and the trace of an allergen can put the child in a potentially life-threatening situation.
Miniature versions of popular candies may contain different ingredients from the regular-sized products.
Ensuring Halloween food safety can be particularly tricky since during Halloween, there are many kinds of unlabeled candies. These are best avoided. And children should be warned not to accept any food from friends.
“It’s really important for the caregiver on Halloween night to bring a safe supply of foods along with the trick-or-treaters, so that there are no nasty surprises,” says Dr. Bassett.
Peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, milk and soy are the most common causes of food allergies in children.
To look out for kids’ Halloween food safety, it’s also recommended that kids carry an EpiPen with them at all times, so that they may be given epinephrine if needed.
Food-related anaphylaxis leads to 150-200 deaths each year, so every exposure should be taken seriously. If a child who has had a past anaphylactic reaction eats a food to which he or she is allergic, even if there are no immediate symptoms, it is advised to give them epinephrine and call 911 immediately.
Symptoms of anaphylaxis include:
• Itching and hives over large areas of the body
• Tingling sensation in the mouth
• Swelling in the throat or tongue
• Difficulty breathing
• Dizziness
• Stomach cramps
• Nausea or diarrhea
Symptoms typically appear within minutes to two hours after the person has eaten the food to which he or she is allergic.
Doctors recommend that to ensure Halloween food safety, the EpiPen should be used immediately if any of these occur after eating something. It is very important for parents to talk to the family doctor about how and when to use the EpiPen.
For people with food allergies, eating even a small amount of these foods could start a life-threatening allergic reaction, called anaphylaxis. This is especially true for peanut allergies.
“If he touches it and then touches his face, he’ll have hives. The worst reaction would be if he actually ingested it. That would immediately induce an anaphylactic reaction but that hasn’t happened yet. We’re very, very lucky that it has never gotten to that stage,” says Sandy.
When it comes to her son, Halloween food safety is a problem Sandy has got an eye on.