[kevingadd]

'Sesame is the ninth most common food allergy among children and adults in the U.S. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), sesame allergy is considered common among children who already have other food allergies. According to research reported by NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a study found that approximately 17 percent of children with food allergies also are allergic to sesame.'

I'm not sure whether 17% of child food allergies counts as an edge case? Food allergies are serious stuff.

[danaris]

They are, but that's a potentially misleading statistic, on two counts:

First, it doesn't give any indication of the percentage of children with food allergies. Is it also about 20% (which would mean sesame allergies affect approximately 4% of children)? Or is it more like 4% (which would mean sesame allergies affect approximately 0.8% of children)?

Second, it doesn't say anything about the severity of the allergy. My brother-in-law has a severe, anaphylactic allergy to peanuts. Traces of peanut in anything he eats could kill him. On the other hand, I have a close friend with an allergy to tree nuts...that makes his throat kinda itchy for a while if he eats too many.

Yes, we need to be mindful of food allergies, and properly label foods for them. But that doesn't mean we should be using incomplete or misleading statistics to inform our decisions about how prevalent serious problems with certain foods could be.

[shkkmo]

For actual numbers, I found this.

> Using survey responses from 78 851 individuals, an estimated 0.49% (95% CI, 0.40%-0.58%) of the US population reported a current sesame allergy, whereas 0.23% (95% CI, 0.19%-0.28%) met symptom-report criteria for convincing IgE-mediated allergy. An additional 0.11% (95% CI, 0.08%-0.16%) had a sesame allergy reported as physician diagnosed but did not report reactions fulfilling survey-specified convincing reaction symptoms. Among individuals with convincing IgE-mediated sesame allergy, an estimated 23.6% (95% CI, 16.9%-32.0%) to 37.2% (95% CI, 29.2%-45.9%) had previously experienced a severe sesame-allergic reaction, depending on the definition used, and 81.6% (95% CI, 71.0%-88.9%) of patients with convincing sesame allergy had at least 1 additional convincing food allergy. Roughly one-third of patients with convincing sesame allergy (33.7%; 95% CI, 26.3%-42.0%) reported previous epinephrine use for sesame allergy treatment.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

[halefx]

FYI for your tree nut friend, itchy throat is often a sign of "oral allergy syndrome" (could be useful for him if he hasn't already seen an allergist)

[kalleboo]

The edge case here isn't just "anyone with the allergy" but "people with the allergy so severe that a trace amount will cause danger to them"