New device can sniff out deadly food allergens in 30 seconds

In a horrific story of terror at 10,000 feet, an 8-year-old girl with severe food allergies was exposed to pistachio shells that had been left, unbeknownst to her and her usually vigilant parents, in the seatback pocket of the row in front of her during a harrowing 2014 airplane ride home. The girl’s throat swelled – she was going into anaphylactic shock – and, despite her parents immediately injecting her with an emergency shot of epinephrine, she remained highly agitated during the remaining three hours of the flight.

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The flight attendants “didn’t take it seriously,” refusing to inform the pilot or consider an emergency landing, the girl’s mother said, “Mommy, I don’t want to die,” the girl repeated to her mother. Ultimately, they made it to their destination and the girl survived, but the trauma of traveling with food allergies is something that many people all over the world experience. Food allergies are serious business. In the United States alone, 32 million people suffer from allergies from a variety of foods, with peanuts being the most common. This results in some 300,000 emergency visits a year – a new visit every three minutes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 6% of children under the age of 18 have food allergies, an increase of more than 50% in the last decade alone. Worldwide, around 250 million people have food allergies. What’s needed is a fast and inexpensive way to scan one’s surroundings such as a plane, a school classroom or, when dining out, a plate of food served in a restaurant, for potentially fatal allergic triggers. That’s what an Israeli startup, Allerguard, is doing.

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