Yeah, that’s the bit that really worries me. The similarly malnourished 10-year-old sister is mentioned once and never referred to again.
Let’s hope and pray that the younger child’s protective custody leads to further investigation, and ideally criminal charges. Given how legendarily underfunded and incompetent Child Protection services tend to be, I’m not holding my breath.
Except for, you know, a baby.
Babies also have very sensitive skin. They may have thought a rash or some other skin affliction was a sign of allergies.
‘Naturopathic’ in the “Oh, you wish that ‘red in tooth and claw’ were the worst that nature had in store for you.” sense, apparently.
People just plain don’t get what allergies are. In my brief tenure working in hospital food service, people have variously reported to have been allergic to:
Then there are the idiots who say they’re allergic to everything they don’t like, and then complain when we send them an unseasoned piece of chicken and bland white rice. That’s when these allergies suddenly become, “intolerances”. God how I hate that word. People think that they feel the slightest bit scratchy or have a little diarrhea after eating something that they will die if they eat it again. Look, there are many real allergies and there are in fact people out there with an immense number of allergies. But when a friend of mine’s grandmother claims she feels congested because her granddaughter got a flu shot- we’re getting out of bounds.
The worst part is that it endangers people with real allergies. It makes people less cautious and more cavalier about handling the food of a person who reports an allergy. I’ve seen it happen. There’s no malice behind it, it’s just the inevitable result of having too many “DANGER!” signs without much corresponding danger. It’s similar to the effect of a certain color coded, terrorism alert system. If it never changes color, it ceases to be useful.
I’ve been told that the actually-gluten-afflicted are deeply vexed by this particular problem. Now that every third person is ‘gluten free’ because they are following a fad diet or have some vague theory about something or other, restaurants and the like have (not totally unreasonably) started to cater to that market with ‘gluten free’ products that don’t contain any bulk wheat ingredients or other obvious sources; but wouldn’t necessarily pass an immunoassay. So now they have to play the “no, ‘gluten free’, as in ‘this isn’t my fucking fad diet’ gluten free” game in addition to just finding places that accommodate them.
Given how anemic this child clearly was, I can’t imagine she actually got that much bison meat in her diet.
She probably would have been better off if they caged her and just fed her Blue Buffalo dog food…
As a parent of a child with severe food intolerances, I would like to say that genuine sensitivities of the kind mentioned in this article do exist.
Our 5 year old son is on a very restricted diet similar to the one this little girl was on, and has been for 4 years. However, we’ve had professional diagnosis of the problem, which initially presented with skin lesions that eventually covered his entire body, combined with sleep and behavioural problems.
He takes a daily multivitamin and calcium supplementation, and has a 6-weekly visit with a nutritionist to monitor his progress. Now he is to all appearances a normal 5 year old, ahead of the curve on the growth charts for weight and height, but if he eats foods over his (very low) threshold for salicylates, amines, glutamates, or many classes of preservatives, we see extreme mood swings, aggression, hyperactivity, rashes.
As a result of educating ourselves on the subject, I’ve come to believe that a lot of our children’s behavioural problems may be connected to food. The tales about sugar making kids hyper are false - it’s the colourings and preservatives that affect children with those sensitivities. Food as a cause is worth investigating, if you’re experiencing such problems, but I can’t stress enough that any self-diagnosis needs to be backed by professional confirmation and monitoring.
Seems like MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity) by proxy… i.e. projection of the parents’ mental health issues on the kids.
I think the problem is the internet and the culture of resolute ignorance that it’s bred. It’s taken a bunch of people that were basically ignorant and made them just as ignorant, but with the resolve that they know everything they need to know about everything and more and better than anybody else. In addition to making cases like this known, people need to understand that everything they think they know is probably wrong.
For what ever reason, some people loose their fucking minds when it comes to their kids. (What would happen to these people back in the day when half of your offspring died before age 3?)
Who has bought cancer free sand and homeopathic bullshit before < this guy.
I think one of the reasons is if there is an opinion or a view, it is on there on the internet. Our brains are wired to accept data that reinforces our thoughts, and ignore data that doesn’t. I don’t think these thoughts are new, but because we can now network with other people with these same thoughts, we get caught up in a feedback loop that just reinforces our opinion.
After some reflection, and since I haven’t seen anyone else mention it, I guess I will. Some of this also stems, I suppose, from the underhandedness of other industries, where it results in paranoia overall.
Hiding information about negative occurrences and side effects during trials, makes the pharm industry suspect. Reading too much about Monsanto and the food industry also probably scared the bejesus out of these parents. They didn’t know how to process and balance out that information to the point where it became a mental illness, like a phobia. If one dog bit and hurt a child, all dogs must be avoided at all costs.
The other side of that is that some life styles become a religion to some people.
Aquagenic urticaria isn’t technically a histamine reaction, but the symptoms are close enough to “water allergy” that the difference is academic for sufferers. It’s quite rare, though.
I assume you’re aware with the Feingold Program? It helped me as a child, and the reaction to salicylates, colors, and preservatives sounds familiar.
sigh
I always hated seeing things like this.
I think the whole ‘we own this human because we birthed him’ attitude needs to be hammered out of our society HARD. If you’re raising a person, you have a responsibility to them and to everybody that’s going to be stuck dealing with whoever you raised.
Parents shouldn’t be such a huge hindrance and a kid shouldn’t be punished for losing the birth lottery.
We’re aware of Feingold, I appreciate you mentioning it though, thanks. We actually use the FAILSAFE diet, developed by allergists at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Brisbane, which covers amines and glutamates in addition to the salicylates, preservatives and colourings covered by Feingold. For anyone interested in this subject, fedup.com.au is a good resource.
I can assure you, this wasn’t any recognized medical problem, rare or otherwise.
