Girl dies after eating Chips a Hoy cookies with peanuts

[ClaraC]

Originally Posted by Ms. Tarabotti

I have food allergies.

You can not rely on just looking at the color of the packaging. Ingredients can change over time so people who have food allergies need to read the labels every time. If you have severe life threatening allergies, this is doubly important.

But realistically, someone with such a severe peanut allergy as she had is unlikely to have a long life. Mislabeled foods, or a sandwich prepared on a surface and with a knife used to spread peanut butter, kissing some guy who just had a peanut butter sandwich, etc.

Some deadly allergies are more manageable - shellfish, for example, isn't in all that much stuff so it's easier to avoid.

[Suburban_Guy]

And, still, some people still don't get it. I'm afraid they never ever will so pointless trying to argue with them.

Let's make this easier for everyone else:

1. The 15 year old girl was clearly responsible for what happened. She took the cookie from the package, put it in her mouth, and suffered a horrible reaction. There is no basis for a lawsuit. Most of us here agree, so corporate responsibility for this particular incident is NOT the issue here.

2. The current packaging should suffice to indicate peanuts within the cookies.

3. However, people who should know better can and do have mental lapses and make terrible mistakes. That's a fact of basic human nature, and history is littered with the consequences of these mistakes (the 1994 Piper oil rig disaster that cost 167 lives was caused by a worker forgetting to put back a safety valve after a routine inspection). The over eagerness to demonize the child and parent in this case is similar to those who demonize adults who leave their kids in hot cars.

We all go on autopilot frequently in our lives and do things without thinking about it. If someone with peanut allergies has regularly and safely eaten from a brand of cookies, they may not necessarily think to check every single time to look at the packaging if the outer package looks similar in color. Sure, I get it that all of you on here would check every single time if you had food allergies, but that's irrelevant, because it happened to this girl. What's happened has happened, your faux outrage and demonization of the family serves zero purpose at this point. A rational, sensible, and mature individual would think, what could be done to prevent such incidents in the future.

As another example, the healthcare industry has had many incidents of patients being given the wrong drug based on similar looking packaging.

Here is an example (epinephrine on left, midazolam on right):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...90506814001122



This was a real life case where a patient undergoing colonoscopy was accidentally given the epinephrine and suffered a reaction; one of the root causes was the similarity in vial appearance. Even experienced medical personnel routinely make such mistakes.

4. Nabisco/Mondelez needs to stop making condescending generic statements regarding this incident and make a change to their packaging. I can see your typical CD member insulting the family, but no excuse for a corporation to do so. Changing the packaging is being proactive, 1 in 13 kids have severe food allergies. In the perfect world of many CD posters here, such errors should never happen, but they do, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with putting in extra safety measures.

[Sundaydrive00]

Originally Posted by ClaraC

But realistically, someone with such a severe peanut allergy as she had is unlikely to have a long life.

No. Realistically, people are able to survive life just fine despite allergies.

[Javacoffee]

Originally Posted by Suburban_Guy

And, still, some people still don't get it. I'm afraid they never ever will so pointless trying to argue with them.

Let's make this easier for everyone else:

1. The 15 year old girl was clearly responsible for what happened. She took the cookie from the package, put it in her mouth, and suffered a horrible reaction. There is no basis for a lawsuit. Most of us here agree, so corporate responsibility for this particular incident is NOT the issue here.

2. The current packaging should suffice to indicate peanuts within the cookies.

3. However, people who should know better can and do have mental lapses and make terrible mistakes. That's a fact of basic human nature, and history is littered with the consequences of these mistakes (the 1994 Piper oil rig disaster that cost 167 lives was caused by a worker forgetting to put back a safety valve after a routine inspection). The over eagerness to demonize the child and parent in this case is similar to those who demonize adults who leave their kids in hot cars.

We all go on autopilot frequently in our lives and do things without thinking about it. If someone with peanut allergies has regularly and safely eaten from a brand of cookies, they may not necessarily think to check every single time to look at the packaging if the outer package looks similar in color. Sure, I get it that all of you on here would check every single time if you had food allergies, but that's irrelevant, because it happened to this girl. What's happened has happened, your faux outrage and demonization of the family serves zero purpose at this point. A rational, sensible, and mature individual would think, what could be done to prevent such incidents in the future.

As another example, the healthcare industry has had many incidents of patients being given the wrong drug based on similar looking packaging.

Here is an example (epinephrine on left, midazolam on right):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...90506814001122



This was a real life case where a patient undergoing colonoscopy was accidentally given the epinephrine and suffered a reaction; one of the root causes was the similarity in vial appearance. Even experienced medical personnel routinely make such mistakes.

4. Nabisco/Mondelez needs to stop making condescending generic statements regarding this incident and make a change to their packaging. I can see your typical CD member insulting the family, but no excuse for a corporation to do so. Changing the packaging is being proactive, 1 in 13 kids have severe food allergies. In the perfect world of many CD posters here, such errors should never happen, but they do, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with putting in extra safety measures.

You can show us all the vials you want. The fact is there was nothing wrong with the safety measures Chips Ahoy put in place on their package.

[Sundaydrive00]

Originally Posted by Suburban_Guy

We all go on autopilot frequently in our lives and do things without thinking about it. If someone with peanut allergies has regularly and safely eaten from a brand of cookies, they may not necessarily think to check every single time to look at the packaging if the outer package looks similar in color. Sure, I get it that all of you on here would check every single time if you had food allergies, but that's irrelevant, because it happened to this girl.

That's the thing though, this brand of cookies wasn't safe. They manufacture peanut butter cookies. They have warnings about this even on their regular chocolate chip cookies. Her parents should have taught her to always check what she is eating and to not assume that a cookie is safe just because it is in a red packaging.

My brother has a nut allergy. When eating out, he asks every single time he gets dessert about nuts. His allergies are not even severe enough where he would die, but he still makes sure that the cheesecake, brownie, or whatever is nut free. Yeah its a pain to always have to ask, but its better to be safe then dead.

Instead of complaining about the cookie company's packaging, the parents should be stressing the importance of educating children about their allergies... For parents to make sure their children know to check ingredients, that they know how to use their epi pen, and that they carry it with them at all times.

[ocnjgirl]

Originally Posted by LLCNYC

+1.

How dare you ask parents to actually parent! So offensive!



Common sense & personal responsibility is long gone. Longggggg gone.

Kids accidentally swallowed poisonous chemicals back in the day, too, even in my grandparents day this stuff happened.. It takes about one second for something to go wrong with kids. Didn't your mom ever go to the bathroom??? You were never, ever out of her sight until you turned 18??

[CatTX]

I was really careless when I was 15, as were most of my friends. So I can totally understand how this could happen. Considering she knew she had dangerous allergies it is strange (and very sad) that no one called for an ambulance as soon as her mouth started tingling and before she went home, perhaps earlier medical intervention could have saved her. But maybe there were no adults at her friend's house.

[JerseyGirl415]

Originally Posted by ocnjgirl

She wants the bag to be a different color than the ones that don’t have peanut butter. Not an unreasonable suggestion.

But the company already color codes in its own way, which some people have caught onto (myself included). There is no actual reason for this family or girl to assume that red always = no nuts; that's just the association she had because her parents always bought those for her so she was used to red = no nuts. It seems like she got too comfortable in a habit, or perhaps her parents didn't properly teach her to be careful of what she eats, especially at someone else's house. Neither would be the company's fault.

The company has never represented that red = no nuts. There are non-chewy cookies that come in other color packaging that also have nuts. Like, the same cookies, but hard not chewy, also come in blue packaging (because blue = not chewy). No reason at all to assume that red means no nuts.

This girl made a quick, stupid mistake that cost her her life, and it's so senseless and upsetting that she took a cookie without checking the packaging, knowing how severe her allergy was, that her parents are looking for someone else to blame. I understand where they're coming from, because people tend to do this, but I don't buy it.

Basically, color seems to be an issue for them. I wonder how many other people, if any, also assume that any red packaging means there are no nuts. Is this an actual issue or a them issue? If it's not widespread, not a mistake multiple people have made for the same reason, I'd call it a non-issue, and therefore it would be unreasonable for the company to conform to what this mother wants.

[saibot]

Originally Posted by JerseyGirl415

This girl made a quick, stupid mistake that cost her her life, and it's so senseless and upsetting that she took a cookie without checking the packaging, knowing how severe her allergy was, that her parents are looking for someone else to blame. I understand where they're coming from, because people tend to do this, but I don't buy it.

Well, of course they are. They're heartbroken at losing their daughter, and it's probably the case that if all Chips Ahoy cookies with peanuts, but no other varieties, were packaged in neon green, she'd still be alive.

But if and when they are able to think rationally about this again--which may not ever happen, considering the magnitude of the loss--they will probably admit that the fault lies with their daughter for not checking the package, and themselves for telling her that red packages were "safe." Had they verified that ALL red packages were nut-free? Clearly not.

The fault is not with the fact that Chips Ahoy's color-coding system did not do something it was never intended to do. This will sound heartless, but if the scenario is what we've been told (carelessness on the girl's part + misinformation from the parents), a similar accident would most likely happened to her sooner or later no matter what packaging a particular cookie company uses.

[vision33r]

Why is it kids from 3rd world countries have no nut allergies and why are we in the world of excess having this problem? I hear people say we are just more allergic and sensitive. I think there's a problem with our environment and food sources. People have been eating peanuts for centuries.