Every night, Nate’s mom snips open a small packet of peanut powder that, because he’s 8 years old, he would prefer she sprinkle over ice cream. Usually, though, she mixes it with water or Kool-Aid or yogurt, and then Nate swallows it all down. “Two dot four,” Nate dutifully says, or 1,200 milligrams of powder weighing 2.4 grams—the equivalent of four peanuts.

It is something of a minor miracle: Nate Alexander was born with a severe—possibly deadly—peanut allergy. When he was 18 months old, his mother, Jo Ann, found him listless and wheezing at day care, his skin blotchy, his eyes swollen and rolling back in his head—a reaction to a peanut butter cracker. “All those symptoms,” Jo Ann says, “except, thank God, for the dying part.” Her pediatrician told her that the double dose of Benadryl she gave Nate during the race to the doctor might have been the thing that saved him.

And Nate is hardly alone. Food allergies have exploded in recent decades. True, there is an element of increased awareness and diagnosis: The gastrointestinal distress of, say, a milk allergy might have been dismissed as simply a weak stomach a generation ago. But the rise is also real, dramatic and documented. Indeed, one study showed a doubling of peanut allergies between 1997 and 2002, from about one in 250 kids to one in 125—a trend that suggests nearly 1% of children may be affected now. As it is, about 12 million Americans suffer from a food allergy, according to The Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN). That number includes 2.2 million school-aged children and one in every 17 children younger than 3. More than 30,000 Americans end up in the emergency room every year, and an estimated 150 to 200 die.

“We’re basically looking at what may be a public-health crisis, and we have to find ways to deal with it,” says Dr. Scott H. Sicherer, a researcher at the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

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