By Kimberley Yates, CEO and Founder, Latitude Food Allergy Care
Camp can be a special time for kids and teens to feel independent, expand their social circles, and grow their interests. The overnight camp environment also gives them an opportunity to practice self-advocacy with trusted adults. All of these are really important skills for any children, but especially so for those impacted by food allergies. As you finalize plans for camp this summer, keep these tips in mind for the approximately 15% of campers who have food allergies.
Parents’ Prep Work
By the time a child is heading to overnight camp around 8 or 9 years old, most food allergy parents already have a unique set of skills to assess environments for risk factors and ask necessary questions. These are some of the questions for parents to discuss with the camp leadership:
What are the foods that are served and what, if any, modifications can be made?
How will emergencies be handled? Specifically, who is trained to recognize the signs of an allergic reaction, and where will epinephrine be located?
Who can you communicate with before camp begins: a medical staff member, a chef, or another food allergy family who has attended in previous years?
Providing a clear emergency action plan and updating required camp forms each year is a critical part of managing food allergies for your overnight camper. Before submitting those forms, have a discussion with your allergist about the following:
If your child has recently surpassed the recommended weight of their junior dosage of epinephrine (EpiPen Jr® for example is prescribed for >66lb), do you need new prescriptions?
Do you require multiple sets of autoinjectors or asthma inhalers (for example, front office, cabin, to self-carry)?
Allergies can change. Accurate testing with blood tests and skin tests with an experienced allergist is recommended annually. Sometimes those tests can warrant oral food challenges. And there is really high emotional value in discovering that some of the foods a child has been avoiding were based on unclear or outdated information, and can in fact be safely eaten! When you reduce the list of foods that a child fears and put foods back into their diet, we can immediately impact the whole family's quality of life, and specifically their approach to summer camp.
Watch Out for a False Sense of Security
Some camps might be designated as “nut-free” or “nut-safe,” but it’s important to remember most camps can only control the food that is provided in the dining hall or canteen. Consider that other campers and counselors might have care kits or personal stashes of foods that could be unsafe for your child. Similar to “nut-free” tables in school cafeterias, the camp might also have chosen to restrict foods that would not actually trigger your child’s symptoms. For example, dairy is actually a very common allergen in children in the United States, yet it is not common to find a dairy-restricted camp.
Making Camp Safer
I understand this stress well. My daughter was one of those children with many more severe life-threatening food allergies than peanuts. As a child, she was allergic to dairy, wheat, egg, peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, and sesame. Summer camp felt impossible to my family for most of her childhood until she was treated for her food allergies in a groundbreaking clinical trial with oral immunotherapy (OIT) with Xolair. A decade later, she has traveled around the world independently (the ultimate summer camp!) and is in her second year of college thousands of miles away from home. With my daughter’s treatment success, it became my mission to share food allergy solutions with families so they can safely experience travel and camp, too. Today thousands of people around the world have gone through OIT with life-changing results. Treatment lasts generally less than a year, so stay safe this summer and start treatment soon after. Summer camp planning next year could be more fun and far less stressful for food allergy families like ours.
Kimberley Yates (Grosso) is the founder of Latitude Allergy Care. The desire to find a treatment for her daughter Tessa’s multiple severe food allergies drove Kimberley to raise the resources for a clinical trial using Oral Immunotherapy (OIT), which led to the founding of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University, a world-renowned food allergy research center. To make these treatments accessible, she started Latitude Food Allergy Care, the leading network of clinics providing life-changing testing and treatment, including oral immunotherapy (OIT), to help families with food allergies live more freely.
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