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Passenger With Peanut Allergy Feared She'd Die On Plane After Airline Handed Out Nuts — Despite Her Warning

A UK passenger with a deadly peanut allergy thought she'd die after two airlines handed out peanuts on a 14-hour journey — despite her notifying them of her allergy in advance.

UK passenger Amy Pearson, who has a deadly peanut allergy, thought she'd die after two airlines handed out peanuts on a 14-hour journey despite her disclaimer. Kennedy News & Media

"I was petrified," Amy Pearson, 25, told Kennedy News of the frightening incident, which occurred last month while she was flying to see her sister Molly Pearson, 24, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. "I sat still the whole time. I didn't want to touch anything and didn't use the toilet."

The Lincolnshire native allegedly suffers from a severe airborne nut allergy, which could cause her to go into anaphylactic shock — a life-threatening allergic reaction — if exposed. She reportedly carries an Epi-pen wherever she goes.

(From right to left): Amy Pearson with her sister Molly Pearson. Kennedy News & Media

As a result, the geography teacher had to inform airlines of her condition before flying, claiming that most agreed not to serve nuts while she was aboard.

Pearson said that ahead of her latest flight, her travel agent informed Qatar Airways — her carrier during the first leg of the journey from the UK to Qatar — of her condition and she was given the green light to fly.

When the Brit arrived at the check-in desk, she informed them that she was the passenger with the peanut allergy.

However, the clerks on duty said "they were not aware of this" and even made her sign a waiver that stipulated that it was "not their fault" if she died, Pearson recalled.

Pearson boarded the plane and informed the flight attendants of her allergy, but they refused to stop slinging nuts on board.

Where Pearson was forced to stand while staffers determined whether she'd be able to board the plane for the first leg of her flight back to the UK. "I'm just in shock and really disgusted by the way they're prepared to treat people," said Pearson. Kennedy News & Media

"They said they [Qatar Airways] couldn't cater to this and if I read the small print it would say this," she said. She added that they wouldn't honor her request to announce her condition over the intercom, claiming that they couldn't "dictate what people could eat on board."

At that point, Pearson said she was reduced to pleading with the people around her, who fortunately agreed to abstain from eating nuts. However, the Qatar Airways crewmembers told her "that air circulates on a plane and they [the nuts] could just be in the air," she recounted.

"I had never been on a flight this long before so I didn't know how I was going to react," said Pearson, who fortunately had four Epi-pens with her.

To make matters worse, this was just the first leg of a 14-hour journey (her longest ever), the second of which was with Malaysia Airlines.

Unfortunately, just like on Qatar, crew members handed out "packets of peanuts as a complimentary snack" despite Pearson informing them of her condition.

"On their app, it said that they provide special meals so I put on that I had a nut allergy," lamented Pearson, who was allegedly given a "COVID-style" face mask to protect her against the peanut fumes.

She said she sat still the whole time and wouldn't touch anything or even go to the lavatory for fear of contamination.

As neither airline acquiesced to her request for a special meal, the beleaguered flyer was relegated to eating a plate of fruit — which was all she ate during the entire 14-hour trip.

Unfortunately, it turned into Groundhog Day on the return leg to the UK, where crew members assured she'd be treated better, only for them to yank her off the aircraft shortly after boarding.

"They [the airline] assured my travel agent that I would be treated much better on the return," said Pearson. "I boarded the plane and told them I was the one with the nut allergy and they took me off the flight as they are not sure if I can fly."

She added, "At this point, I am crying because I have just said goodbye to my sister for a year and I am now being told I am stuck in Malaysia."

Staffers said they needed to ring headquarters to see if they could fly, and even made Pearson fill out another waiver so she could board the plane.

Upon arriving in Qatar, the pedagogue didn't say anything to the crew, only imploring her fellow passengers to once again to abstain from eating nuts. When she reached out to the airlines to complain, she received automated responses.

Pearson, who is now back home safe in the UK, has vowed never to fly with either airline again, declaring: "It's not fair. If I knew that they were like this I would have never flown with them."

"I'm a geography teacher and I want to promote people to go and see the world and traveling is the best thing to do but it shouldn't be stopped by a nut allergy," the teacher added.

Pearson claimed she was discriminated against given that every other airline she flew with had catered to her allergy.

"[Other airlines in the past] have made an announcement to tell people to not eat nuts on board and wouldn't serve nuts on board," she said.

She said she's using her incident to "raise awareness of the issue so that other people don't have the same problem."

Both Qatar Airways and Malaysia Airlines referred Kennedy News to their policies regarding passengers with peanut allergies.

"We do our best to accommodate passengers with special allergy needs," Qatar writes on its site.

"However, as our flights are open to the public, we cannot guarantee an allergen-free environment."

They stipulate that passengers "are responsible for carrying any necessary medication with them onboard" and that they "may be required to sign a waiver of liability."

Meanwhile, the Malaysia Airlines website stipulates that the airline will not implement peanut-free or nut-free buffer zones and/or remove the service of peanut or nut snacks.

They will also not make onboard announcements refraining passengers from consuming peanuts/nuts.

"We recommend that passengers familiarise themselves with the peanut/nut allergy policy and protocols of any airline they are traveling with prior to making their booking, to ensure their needs can be accommodated," an airline representative told Kennedy.

A Food-Allergy Fix Hiding In Plain Sight

Tami McGraw used to be so allergic to red meat that even fumes from cooking might send her into anaphylactic shock. She couldn't fry sausages for her family. She couldn't go to cookouts with friends. Once, she passed out driving home with her son after accidentally inhaling fumes while volunteering at the school cafeteria. "That's the closest I came to dying," she told me. Every whiff of sizzling meat, every journey out of the house came spring-loaded with danger.

The episode in the school cafeteria rattled McGraw so much that she brought up with her allergist a then-unorthodox therapy called Xolair. Xolair is a bimonthly or monthly injection originally approved in 2003 for asthma, which McGraw has been diagnosed with. But doctors had long suspected that Xolair could do more, and they had already started noticing an intriguing curious side effect in asthma patients: Their allergic reactions to food were diminished too.

McGraw's doctor agreed to prescribe her Xolair—officially for asthma but unofficially with the hope of treating her allergy. Soon, she found she could cook red meat in the house again. Then, she could eat it. She had a bite of bacon, a bite of hamburger. All good. McGraw still doesn't care for red meat—doctors recommend continuing avoidance, and she had developed a distaste after her allergic reactions anyway—but she no longer worries about a cross-contaminated utensil or fumes lingering in the air. "I could go in places without fear," she said. "I could go out to eat." Since 2016, she has been living, in other words, a pretty normal life.

Earlier this year—more than 20 years after Xolair first came to market and eight years after it transformed McGraw's life—Xolair was approved for food allergies. The drug is finally available to the millions of Americans with severe, sometimes-fatal allergic reactions. Rates of food allergies have been rising this entire time, nearly doubling in children since Xolair was initially developed. Though it is not meant to be a cure, the drug provides enough protection against accidental exposure to bring tremendous relief.

"It's a complete life-changer," says Robert Wood, a pediatric allergist at Johns Hopkins who co-led the study that recently got Xolair green-lighted for food allergies. And it's been a long time coming.

Xolair works by intercepting immune molecules called IgE, known to be a trigger in allergic reactions. For this reason, its potential to calm food allergies was apparent from the very beginning, but a frustrating series of events in the 2000s kept drugs like it out of many patients' reach.

First, a similar drug that was ahead of Xolair in development was unceremoniously shelved in 2004—despite promising results in treating peanut allergy—as the result of a bitter legal battle between its manufacturer and Xolair's. This cleared the path for Xolair, which suffered a different setback: Its clinical trial for peanut allergy was terminated early in 2006 for safety reasons unrelated to the drug itself. Two children had severe reactions when they were being "challenged" with peanuts to gauge the extent of their allergy. Xolair's manufacturer deemed the peanut challenges, and therefore the whole trial, too risky. The incomplete results from the study, when they were published, nevertheless looked encouraging.

Throughout this period, Xolair was available to patients with asthma, and in 2014, it was also approved for idiopathic, or unexplained, chronic hives. Both of these conditions tend to involve high levels of IgE, the molecule that Xolair blocks. They often overlap with food allergies, says Scott Commins, an allergist at the University of North Carolina, who is also McGraw's doctor. This led to a two-tier system: Commins could offer Xolair to food-allergy patients who, like McGraw, also had asthma or chronic hives. Patients who didn't have multiple conditions were out of luck. They could get Xolair off-label, but few could afford it. Insurance companies do not cover off-label prescriptions, and the list price runs $30,000 to $60,000 a year. "We were definitely not able to use it as much as we wanted," Commins told me.

To secure FDA approval and insurance coverage of Xolair for food allergies, patients needed more than promising preliminary data and anecdotal stories: They needed a big, definitive clinical trial. In 2019, Wood and other researchers finally secured the funding for such a trial, dubbed OUtMATCH, which was a collaboration between the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Xolair's manufacturers. The results of the first of its three stages were published this February: After 16 weeks on Xolair, two-thirds of participants allergic to peanuts and at least two other foods (such as milk and eggs) were able to eat the equivalent of two and a half peanuts. A similar proportion could eat their other allergy foods too. This study persuaded the FDA to approve the drug for food allergies.

Xolair is most life-changing for patients with allergies that are difficult to avoid—either because their allergen is rarely labeled or because they react to even trace amounts, or both. That includes people like McGraw, and it includes people like Christine Robinson, whom I interviewed five years ago about her corn allergy. Chemicals derived from corn, it turns out, are hidden just about everywhere in processed food: Robinson would react to bottled water, iced tea, table salt, bagged salads, frozen fish, the wax on apples and oranges. She went out with an armament of Benadryl, Zantac, prednisone, and EpiPens, the last of which delivers a jolt of emergency epinephrine to counteract anaphylaxis. Since we first talked, she has also started Xolair. "It's amazing, really," she told me recently. She still doesn't eat corn, but her reactivity is much lower. "The reactions are not an emergency now; they are an annoyance." Recently, her EpiPen expired before she had occasion to use it.

Patients with only mild allergies, on the other hand, might not find an injection every two or four weeks worth the trouble. And Xolair did not work as well for one-third of people in the trial. Predicting who will or will not respond to Xolair and understanding why is one of the big remaining questions ahead, says Scott Sicherer, an allergist at Mount Sinai and a principal investigator on the OUtMATCH trial.

Xolair also has the practical advantage of treating multiple food allergies at once, says Stacie Jones, a pediatric allergist at Arkansas Children's Hospital who is also part of the OUtMATCH study. The only other treatment available, oral immunotherapy, is food specific: Patients ingest a tiny daily amount of their allergy food, gradually upping the dose over time until they reach a maintenance dose. An oral immunotherapy for peanuts called Palforzia is approved, and some allergy doctors now offer custom regimens for a number of foods. But the process can be arduous, and patients with multiple allergies generally need to go through it for each food.

Xolair and oral immunotherapy potentially could be used together. The second of the three stages of the OUtMATCH trial was designed to investigate whether adding Xolair can make oral immunotherapy safer and more effective. The third stage follows participants after they discontinue Xolair, and as some reincorporate allergy foods back into their diet. "What we're learning in the clinic and in the study is that most people can actually start to eat the food they're allergic to," Wood told me, adding that the results would be published in the coming months. The data, if convincing, could dramatically change how Xolair is used—the drug is currently approved only alongside strict avoidance.

In our conversation, Wood also evinced more than a hint of impatience about the two decades needed to make Xolair available for food allergies in the first place. "It's honestly quite ridiculous that it took this long," he told me. "But at least we're here now."

NYC Mom Suffered 'very Severe' Allergy Reaction After Biting Into Unlabeled Tahini Cookie — That Barista Insisted Was OK To Eat: Suit

An Upper West Side mom with a severe sesame allergy went into anaphylactic shock when she ate a chocolate-chip cookie — made with tahini — at a local coffee shop, a new lawsuit says.

The cookie was only labeled "chocolate chip" — and while the barista knew it contained tahini, the worker didn't realize tahini is made from sesame seeds and told her it was safe to eat, the Manhattan suit says.

Melissa Schwartz Nemeth's reaction was so severe that the 36-year-old mother and wife is still undergoing medical treatment months later as a result, her suit claims.

Nemeth says in her suit that she was at Oren's Daily Roast on Broadway in April when she decided to purchase a treat while on a walk with her 4-year-old and 18-month-old daughters.

Just one bite into a tahini chocolate chip cookie like this one from Oren's Daily Roast sent an Upper West Side mom into allergic shock, a new lawsuit says. Peter Senzamici/NY Post

The woman's husband, Greg Nemeth, told The Post that his wife's always asks if something contains sesame before biting into any food she didn't prepare herself.

"You wouldn't think necessarily that a chocolate chip cookie would have sesame seeds, but we always ask because you never know," Greg said. "It's a life-or-death scenario every time she eats sesame."

Melissa told the Oren's barista of her severe allergy but was reassured that the cookie was free of sesame, court documents say.

Oren's Daily Roast is located on Broadway near West 112th Street in Manhattan. Peter Senzamici/NY Post

It only took one bite, thanks to her crippling allergy, for Melissa to learn the truth.

As her throat was closing up, Greg told The Post, his wife was determined to get the truth from the barista and asked once again if the seemingly innocuous cookie contained sesame.

Tahini, it turns out, is made from sesame seeds. Chandlervid85 – stock.Adobe.Com

"They said, 'No, no, it's a tahini chocolate chip cookie. There's no sesame,' " Greg said. 

Melissa's lawyer, Scott Koltun, told The Post, "Fortunately she had her EpiPen with her and was able to somehow get her way home."

Greg rushed home from work after his wife called and had to take several days off to watch their two kids while Melissa — a former fashion buyer at Bloomingdales and now full-time mom — was bedridden for the better part of a week as a result of her "very severe reaction," he said. 

Her suit alleges that the coffee shop "failed to listen" when she told them of her allergy, nor did they have the common allergen listed on any labels near the cookie display or on a menu.

The plaintiff, a mother of two, says that the cafe needs to better train its staff to understand the basics of food allergen safety. Peter Senzamici/NY Post

As of last year, state law requires all establishments serving food to post a "food allergy awareness" poster, which implores workers to "take it seriously" if a customer says they have an allergy.

But currently there is no requirement to list allergens on a menu.

According to the suit, the cookie was not made in-house, and the menu has since changed to note that it is a tahini chocolate chip cookie.

"It's important that employees be educated on what exactly they're selling," Koltun said.

Oren's Daily Roast is known for its impressive array of coffee from around the world. Peter Senzamici/NY Post

Melissa previously sued an East Village Mexican restaurant in 2020 over a similar sesame exposure, but the incident appears to have been much less severe, according to the complaint. That suit was eventually settled.

In a recent high profile case, a Long Island doctor died after eating food at Disney Springs restaurant in Florida when a waiter assured her the meal was allergen-free.

"It's concerning that sesame, a common food allergen, and the primary ingredient in tahini, isn't always well-known or disclosed in food establishments," said Sung Poblete of the allergen-awareness group, Food Allergy Research & Education.

"This highlights the need for better restaurant training and clearer food allergen labeling."

Greg Nemeth said his wife Melissa is still undergoing various medical treatments because of the reaction but declined to provide further details. Peter Senzamici/NY Post

Greg said the effect that the tahini cookie has had on his family is immense, saying that Melissa — who did not want to be interviewed for this story — is still "seeing multiple doctors" for ongoing medical issues because of her reaction. He declined to elaborate on what exact conditions his wife may be suffering from.

"It's kind of scary to eat anything that's out of the house at this point," Greg said, adding that they're mostly cooking all their meals at home these days. 

"Every time she takes a bite of food now, she's taking a very, very small first bite to see if there's anything there. And it's scary," he said.

For their 4-year-old daughter, the experience of watching her mother suffering from such a severe reaction was terrifying.

"She was scared," Greg said, "she saw Mommy not being able to breathe."

Oren's Daily Roast did not reply to a Post request for comment.

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