Food allergy campaigners have called for an urgent meeting with the Health Secretary after a teenager with a severe cow’s milk allergy died after suffering an anaphylactic reaction after drinking Costa Coffee hot chocolate.
The inquest into the death of Hannah Jacobs, 13, who had suffered from severe allergies to dairy, fish and eggs since childhood, concluded that there was a “process error” at Costa Coffee which led to her drink being made with cow’s milk instead of soya milk.
The case was a tragic memory for the parents of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, who died in 2016 after eating a baguette from a Pret a Manger branch at Heathrow Airport. The packaging did not indicate that it contained sesame seeds.
In the years since her death, Natasha’s parents, Tanya and Nadim, have set up the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, which campaigns for food preparation legislation and advocates for families with food allergies.
In 2021, they contributed to the introduction of Natasha’s Law, which requires companies to provide pre-packaged foods with a label containing the full list of ingredients.
On Saturday they called for better cultural and societal understanding of food allergies and the introduction of an “allergy tsar” who would consider a range of issues across health, education and business.
Nadim said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The understanding and appreciation of food allergies by society in general, including companies involved in food and drink, really needs to go up.
“Only through this and through behavioral change can people be kept much safer.”
Asked what he would like in terms of government support, Nadim said he wanted to speak directly to the health minister about their concerns. “If Wes (Streeting) was listening, we would say, ‘Look, you’ve been given a mandate with a new sheet of paper to lead this country on health issues. Please just come and talk to us, don’t tell us you’re too busy, as some of your colleagues did when we wrote to them earlier.
“’This is what we have to say, which is perfectly common sense … we know that if you implement some of the things that we are proposing, we can make significant improvements and reverse this crisis that is going on, this allergy epidemic.’”
after newsletter promotion
Tanya said extreme food allergies appear to be on the rise, with 2.4 million adults in the UK living with a diagnosed food allergy.
Although deaths from food allergies remain rare, less than 10 per year In the UK, Tanya said living with a food allergy or raising a child with a food allergy was “really, really scary,” especially given how food is such an integral part of life and society. “Every day can be full of anxiety,” she said.
Hannah’s mother, Abimbola Duyile, has accused Costa Coffee of treating allergy training as a “tick-the-box exercise”. At the time of Hannah’s death, allergen training for new Costa employees consisted of a series of online modules that could be completed at home, and a quiz that trainees had to pass.
The Ednan-Laperouses, who work with Duyile, said the training was far too basic and that problems arose with staff who were not fluent in English. “People were using Google Translate just to understand the questions and repeating the exercise multiple times before they could pass,” Tanya said.