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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I understand some people need emotional support animals and service animals. I get that. But it poses an interesting problem. If you call an airline and tell them you have a peanut allergy, they’ll remove all peanuts from the plane.

But if you tell them you have a dog allergy, they’ll tell you that other persons right to their service animal trumps your allergy.

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Is there supposed to be a contradiction here? No one is negatively affected by not eating peanuts for an in-flight snack. I doubt that holds for legitimate trained service animals. This means that there's at least some tangible cost on both sides that the airline needs to balance.

People can die from peanut allergies.

They can die from animal allergies too.

I’m wondering if you or someone else can point me to some data about the relative difference in risk from allergic reactions to peanuts vs dogs (for example). We certainly hear a lot more about anaphylaxis from food / medicine allergies than we do about dogs or cats. And at the extreme, it seems like everyone I know is mildly allergic to dozens of kinds of tree pollen, but nobody ever freaks out about that. My intuition leads me to believe that some allergies are super popular and not that severe, while others might be more rare and wildly severe.

Dog allergies generally don't kill people.

I'm allergic to cats to the point that when I was an infant they didn't have a number on their scale to quantify it. When I'm exposed to cats, my eyes run and swell shut, my skin gets itchy, but above all that my asthma goes well into problem territory. I imagine there are people allergic to dogs in a similar way, and being in an enclosed space with a dog for multiple hours may, in fact, be a threat to their life.

Peanut allergies don't generally kill people either. Both peanut and animal allergies can kill someone though.

That's a very apples to oranges comparison. Dog allergies aren't deadly and there are interchangeable snacks (most flights nowadays have pretzels in my experience), is not like you could give someone a different hypoallergenic dog and be okay.

> Dog allergies aren't deadly

Animal allergies can be just as deadly as peanut allergies.

That's not actually true, though: https://dogtime.com/lifestyle/56357-can-die-dog-allergy

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