Georgia schools react to allergies as awareness grows

Georgia has no such requirement, and most of the state’s schools do not stock the medication. They can administer it only for students who have a prescription and bring their own medicine. If Forsyth County were not among the handful of districts that pursued a blanket prescription for epinephrine and stocked it in every school, Trent said, the incident might have proved fatal.

Advocates of equipping schools with epinephrine say they know of no allergy-related student deaths in Georgia schools, but point to the deaths in public settings of two teenagers and of a young man at college as evidence of the danger.

In August 2011, Tyler Davis, a student at Kennesaw State University, died of what was believed to be a reaction to a food allergy while on campus. The day before, Jharell Dillard, a 15-year-old from Gwinnett County with a known peanut allergy, died after eating a cookie while out shopping.

Then, in May 2012, Diallo Robbins-Brinson, 15, died after eating at a McDonough restaurant following a soccer tournament. The Macon boy had a severe peanut allergy, but had stopped carrying an epinephrine injector years earlier because it was bulky and because he and his mother believed he could manage his condition.

Diallo ate macadamia nut cookies then quickly developed a rash and red eyes. As his breathing grew labored, his teammates hustled him across the restaurant to his mother. Larmia Robbins-Brinson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she felt safe going to the restaurant because she and her son had been there previously. He had eaten the macadamia nut cookies many times before because he was not allergic to tree nuts.

Diallo collapsed before an ambulance arrived. Robbins-Brinson was surprised by the way her son was suddenly overcome, and wishes she’d been carrying an EpiPen, a well-known brand of epinephrine injector.

“If I had been carrying an EpiPen he would be alive,” she said. “But, you know, you think you can manage it.”

Such miscalculations about the lethality of food allergies drive parents such as Karen Harris to encourage schools to stock the medication, which is also known as adrenaline.

Harris runs a group called Food Allergy Kids of Atlanta, which helped push through a Georgia law this year that makes it clearly legal for school districts to stock and administer epinephrine. She said a quarter of children who have food allergies discover it while at school, which means they won’t have an epinephrine prescription. Other kids, like Diallo, think they can manage their allergy and don’t carry an EpiPen, or maybe their parents can’t afford the kits, she said. (EpiPen packs can cost about $200 or more. The kit includes two injectors that are supposed to be carried together, in case one fails or one dose is not enough.)

Food allergies are nowhere near a top cause of death, but the danger is growing.

In 2010, 10 people died nationwide specifically as a result of a food allergy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the AJC. The agency also reported that the prevalence of reported food allergies among children increased 18 percent from 1997 to 2007, when about three million children — nearly 4 percent of U.S. kids — had a food or digestive allergy. Each year from 2004 to 2006, there were about 9,500 children discharged from hospitals with a diagnosis related to food allergy.

Georgia school districts are becoming aware of the issue. The DeKalb County school board, for instance, adopted a policy in September allowing the superintendent to stock epinephrine districtwide, though the district hasn’t acted on it yet. Vasanne Tinsley, a DeKalb school official who is studying the issue, said the annual cost to stock epinephrine districtwide would be perhaps $15,000, since the medication expires and must be re-purchased. She said that’s less an obstacle than the logistics of implementation in a district with 99,000 students.

In Gwinnett County, where the school system has administered epinephrine to seven students so far this year — all of them pre-diagnosed with food allergies and with their own epinephrine prescriptions — a spokeswoman said the district does not stock the medication for general use because the Georgia Department of Education has not yet implemented regulations under the new state law.

There appears to be no organized resistance to polices that would bring more epinephrine into schools. Dr. Karen Freedle, a pediatrician and food allergy specialist who teaches at Emory University, said more kids are becoming susceptible to food allergies and that schools should stockpile the medicine. She is willing to sign a blanket prescription for any district that asks, and said training people to recognize allergic reactions and administer epinephrine takes all of 15 minutes. Resistance to change and fear of liability is probably the main obstacle, she said.

Robbins-Brinson, the bereaved mother in Macon, said stocking epinephrine injectors is an idea whose time has come.

“I think you would be able to save lives if you had them in the schools,” she said.