Airline passengers with severe and potentially life-threatening food allergies are often too scared to tell gate agents or flight attendants about their condition for fear that they will be booted off the plane, a new study has found.
The study, published by the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology earlier this month, sought to understand the lived experiences of passengers who have a severe food allergy and how this has impacted their travel habits.
Shockingly, nearly two-thirds of the passengers who took part in the study said they never told flight attendants about their allergies, despite the fact that if they were to suffer an anaphylactic shock, it could delay time-critical emergency treatment.
Less than 6% of passengers regularly informed airlines about their allergies, while the majority of those who kept quiet said they did so because they were concerned they would “get in trouble.”
Even more worryingly, even when passengers had suffered an allergic reaction in-flight, not all of them bothered to alert flight attendants or inform the airline, instead preferring to self-treat, including administering their own emergency epinephrine auto-injector.
And while this study sought to uncover how many allergic reactions take place in the air, it might be surprising to learn that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) does not keep tabs on inflight medical emergencies, so official data is lacking.
“There is simply no requirement to collect data on in-flight allergic reactions, no requirement for airlines to file reports and no global standard from agencies like the FAA in the US to even collect them in the first place,” Lianne Mandelbaum, founder of advocacy group No Nut Traveler commented.
“The lack of a mandatory reporting system for in-flight incidents leaves a significant void that severely skews the data pointed to in other studies,” Mandelbaum continued.
In particular, one study published earlier this year in the Archives of Disease in Childhood urged airlines to stop making so-called ‘nut ban announcements,’ requesting passengers to refrain from consuming their own nut snacks when another customer reports their severe food allergy to the airline.
One of the reasons behind this assertion was because the data seems to suggest that the risk of suffering a life-threatening allergic reaction on a plane is much lower than on the ground.
Mandelbaum and other campaigners, however, say there’s actually no way of knowing that for sure because there’s no globally recognized method to collect data about inflight medical emergencies.
In the latest study, it was revealed that more than 42% of passengers who had suffered an allergic reaction on a plane had decided not to report the issue to the flight crew, while less than 30% of passengers formally reported what had occurred to the airline.
Mandelbaum warns that failing to tell the airline about a severe allergic reaction could have dire consequences at 30,000 feet.
“When the crew is not informed, they may assume that your symptoms are from consuming alcohol or due to another medical condition and thus not realize that epinephrine is needed right away,” Mandelbaum explains. “In addition, a flight crew would have no idea where your medications are located.”
Mandelbaum also notes that not every airline carries epinephrine auto-injectors in its medical kits. In the US, airlines are only required to carry epinephrine in vial form, which requires a trained medical professional to administer it.
Earlier this year, Southwest Airlines agreed to start loading epinephrine auto-injectors in its onboard medical kits, following a campaign by advocacy groups and US lawmakers.
