American Airlines Sued Over Peanuts
by Lewis DerkinsJune 3rd, 2008, 7:39 pm
The next time you’re wondering why airline ticket prices are so high, first consider rising oil prices, then increasing government meddling, and add to the list - frivolous lawsuits. Tehmina Haque just sued American Airlines because they served peanuts on a flight despite her four-year-old son’s allergy to peanuts and her notification to the airline of the allergy.
Haque claims in a lawsuit that she was assured several times - from the day she booked the flight in February to the moment she walked through the terminal gate at Kennedy Airport - that peanuts would not be served. But, she said, flight attendants changed the plan without notice.
Now, to be fair to the woman,
An allergic reaction to peanuts can range from a minor irritation to a life-threatening reaction called anaphylaxis. Even people who have only had a mild reaction in the past are at risk of a more serious future reaction.
And peanut allergies can be triggered by inhalation, ingestion, and sometimes through direct skin contact. It has also been shown that airplanes can harbor peanut protein in their air filters. However, a search of both PeanutAllergy.com and The Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, yielded no documented cases of fatal anaphylactic reaction for direct skin contact or inhalation.
So why is this woman acting like the flight attendants were juggling live hand grenades while dressed in sadistic clown costumes?
I understand the desire to protect your child from danger, but come on. Do you roll this kid down the street in a bubble?
The Mayo Clinic lists steps to keep your child safe from peanut allergies. These steps include:
- Notify key people that your child has peanut allergy.
- Make sure your child’s epinephrine autoinjector is always available.
- Explain peanut allergy symptoms.
- Write an action plan.
- Have your child wear a medical alert bracelet or necklace.
- Discourage your child from sharing foods.
It seems like Ms. Haque did all of these, but nowhere on this list does it say, “treat any potential source of peanuts as if it were bubonic plague and ebola virus with a smattering of nuclear weapons and toxic waste rolled into one”. There is no reason to have the kind of reaction that this woman had.
How hard is it to keep your child, who’s sitting right next to you from eating peanuts? DON’T FEED HIM ANY.
I mean, if you’re honestly this concerned, you shouldn’t even be taking the flight in the first place according to the Mayo Clinic study that found the peanut protein in the air filters.
“For the entire flight … plaintiff remained fearful, tense and anxious as she watched over her son’s every breath and body twitch, concerned that at any moment her son could have an anaphylactic reaction while imprisoned 35,000 feet into the air,” read the lawsuit filed yesterday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
And what did this overzealous reaction teach this child? Answer - absolute cowardice. Do you tremble in fear every time you walk down the street lest you encounter an evil snacker with a bag of peanuts? Does your heart quake whenever you walk into the grocery store and pass isle 4 where they sell the peanut products? Give me a break, aren’t we being just a little melodramatic?
Teach your child not to eat peanuts and avoid them. But don’t teach him to recoil in terror – then the other kids will beat him up. Your child cannot avoid all contact with peanuts, like everything else in life it’s a matter of balancing risks, and at some point, you just have to step into traffic and take your chances.
But, you’re right Ms. Haque, the entire flight, nay, the entire airport should be declared a peanut free zone whenever you fly. We’ll even spend the money to clean the air filters so you can rest easy knowing your son won’t suffer any allergic reaction – he’ll only suffer the ill effects of your overbearing protectionism. We’ll gladly pass all of those costs on to the other customers, as well as the costs of your lawsuit, which will cut into our already razor thin margins and hurt everyday people who need to go places even more.
Or maybe, you should just pay a higher ticket price to advance the airline the cost for all of those things? Perhaps you should just drive where you want to go so that you can control everything? My vote is that you grow up so that your son can have a reasonable example to follow as he does the same.
Posted in Airlines |
Lewis, you’re a remarkably opinionated fellow for someone who has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.
My cousin has a serious tree nut allergy that has almost killed her a couple of times and my nephew has ridiculously severe allergy to milk. He can touch a surface that’s been wiped with a sponge but if there is even the tracest amount of milk on that surface and it gets on his skin he’ll start breaking out in hives, his nose will start pouring with snot and his tongue and his throat will begin to swell. If my sister doesn’t stab him with a shot of whatever-it’s-called and then take him to the hospital, it’s entirely possible that this miniscule contact with a trace amount of milk could literally kill him within 30 minutes. This is no longer all that unusual. There are TONS of these kids out there these days.
Strangers think my sister is crazy when she goes into a restaurant or a friend’s home and asks a variety of questions about milk. People tend not to take the allergy seriously (or they just think she’s a neurotic, over-zealous parent) and that has resulted, a couple of times, in massive allergic reactions and trips to the emergency room. It’s incredibly stressful and difficult for her. Having seen that, I can totally relate to why this woman was stressed out about the peanut thing, particularly when she appears to have really gone out of her way to do her due dilligence on the issue. A severe allergic reaction on an airplane would be an absolute nightmare.
But more to the point: Frivolous law suits have nothing to do with increasing ticket prices. Frivolous law suits have been built into the cost of your airplane ticket for a long time now. Ticket prices are rising for one reason only: The price of crude oil and the airlines’ failure to hedge their costs.
This post makes you seem like not just a moron but a callous moron.
Marty,
I’m sorry to hear about your nephew – my wife also had severe allergies as a child, and in fact, on our honeymoon, we had to go to the emergency room because she had a reaction to something, so I’m no stranger to allergies myself.
My point isn’t that allergies aren’t severe – my point is that you cannot protect your child from every hidden danger. I think this was a tremendous overreaction. You and I may never agree on that point, but let me ask a question – what if the flight crew had complied, but by some bizarre coincidence all of the passengers had decided to bring their own peanuts aboard anyway and eat them – what would be this woman’s recourse? Who would she be suing? Or suppose they complied and she rode while there was peanut residue in the air filters that she never asked about? Is she going to sue over that?
I agree that the airline did a pretty crappy thing, but a lawsuit? – That’s extreme. And certain lawsuit costs are factored in to the costs of tickets, but I can guarantee that no business contemplates every single remotely possible lawsuit into their pricing. That would be cost prohibitive; they’re factoring in more common complaints, not something this insane – the kid didn’t even have a reaction. You’re absolutely right about the rising cost of oil being the number one culprit – but these things also have an impact. Even if you’re correct that costs this remote are already factored in, which I disagree with, that still supports my argument that frivolous lawsuits increase your ticket price. If they’re already factored in, then they already have increased your ticket price, and if they went away, your ticket price would fall.
I mean let’s get a handle on things here – if she’s this paranoid about her kid, does she ever let him outside to play? I realize he’s only four, but a four-year-old child is not two. He can understand speech, and I bet he probably has some inkling that he has an allergy to something.
This situation is nothing like the allergy to milk that your nephew has. Milk is a liquid and is therefore more easily absorbed through the skin. As a liquid, it’s also harder to control and easier to spill. Peanut oil is contained inside the peanut and has to be pressed out, so you’re not going to get it in your system by touching a peanut or touching something that a peanut sat on, and again, I couldn’t find any cases of severe anaphylactic shock for this type of contact with peanuts – milk is a different allergy and may have a more severe reaction, but peanuts don’t appear to be as dangerous. Now, I’m no doctor, but we’re applying the common sense test here – if peanuts could kill you that easily, you would know about it, and you should be able to find it pretty easily with a Google search.
He could probably have a reaction if there was a big smear of peanut butter on the tray and he put his hand in it, or if there was peanut oil lying around, but he’s not in danger from pre-shelled peanuts in small snack bags that other people have. People aren’t throwing them around or smearing the contents of their bags on him.
This was an overreaction plain and simple, and I stand by that assessment. You’re welcome to think I’m a jerk, and perhaps if there is karmic justice out there God will give my children severe allergies, but at some point this kid has to learn to function in the normal world, and it can’t always be cleansed of peanuts.
i liked your handling and response to Marty but that’s not to say that i don’t understand Marty’s position.
i don’t know what a lawsuit is going to solve in her son’s peanut allergy but if the mother advised AA about their flight and request that peanuts are not to be served but then AA changes their plans/minds and didn’t notify their crew, well, that’s a pretty big BLEEP up on AA’s part. but i don’t think it warrants a lawsuit especially if the son did not have a reaction to peanuts being served to passengers. although from what it sounds like the grounds for the lawsuit isn’t so much her son’s allergies to peanuts but that the mother claimed that she was tense and had a lot of anxiety during the flight. in which case, she may win because of mental distress.
but then again, if she really cared, she would / should have carried one of those epi-pens for emergencies because you never know what may happen.
and besides, this country loves to sue each other. this should be no surprise that this is even happening.
TDC -
I understand Marty’s position, and again, I sympathize with his nephew. In fact, I sympathize with any child who has to suffer through this type of thing - what a crappy thing to have to grow up with.
I agree with you about it being a huge screw up on AA, but the reason I didn’t take that tack with the post is that we don’t really know what happened. All I really know is that this woman sued, and the basis she sued on.
She claims that she told the airline, but how do we know that’s true? The airline may have a different story. Did she tell the actual flight crew of the plane and get an agreement in advance of the flight and give them time to shift their plans, or did she wait until they were airborne before popping this on an unsuspecting flight attendant? Once they taxi from the gate, it’s a little bit late to change dining plans. Telling someone on the phone or at a ticket counter that your kid has an allergy is a lot different than telling someone who is physically on the plane too. For all we know, maybe the flight crew took her seriously, but discovered there was a doctor on board and when they consulted him, he told them the child would be OK if they served them. For that matter, maybe one of the flight crew has a severe peanut allergy and when the matter came up, he/she told the others it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Of course, that’s all just speculation, but that’s my whole point, I have no idea what really happened here, and I can only pass judgment on the piece that’s out in the open.
I probably would have had a different reaction if the airline admitted that completely disregarded her concerns and did this. Then I probably would have come down on them much harder than on her, but I still would have considered this an overreaction on her part. In fact, if I find out later that the airline admits it knew and didn’t care, I’ll update this post to give it to them too.
As far as the lawsuit goes, I won’t say that I’d be completely surprised if she gets anything, and I’ll admit I don’t know all of New York’s laws, but you usually can’t recover for emotional distress alone unless it’s intentionally inflicted, and since her son didn’t suffer an injury, we’d have to know a lot more about the story in order to determine whether she will or won’t get anything.
this lawsuit reminds me of another lawsuit to another airline. i don’t know if you have already ready this article.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap_travel/20080513/ap_tr_ge/travel_brief_jetblue_lawsuit;_ylt=AoV.OuNj3QtrKm_ZwZ_KVais0NUE