Recent Deaths from Anaphylaxis Underscore Need for Preparedness, Education

Four separate cases of fatal anaphylaxis, all within days of each other, vividly illustrate both the extreme difficulty of avoiding known food allergens and the potential consequences of any given exposure.

Chandler Swink, a 19-year-old student at Oakland University in Michigan, was visiting a friend’s apartment when something triggered his peanut allergy. Someone had baked peanut butter cookies in the kitchen, his mother told the Oakland Press, and peanut particles either got into something Swink ate or onto someone he touched.

As soon as Swink recognized the symptoms, he went to his car to inject himself with epinephrine and drive himself to the hospital. He reached the parking lot, but he never managed to walk into the building. He was found, unconscious in his car, a few yards from the door.

Hospital staff rushed Swink into the building, but doctors were unable to resuscitate him. He spent a week in the hospital, in a coma and on life support, before he finally died.

Just one day later, on Thanksgiving Day, the parents of a 16-year-old from Wisconsin instructed doctors to take their son off of life support and then stood by his bedside and watched him pass away.

Jaime Mendoza, like Swink, had already been diagnosed with a peanut allergy, but he did not carry an epinephrine auto-injector with him. He was, therefore, unable to treat himself when he ate what he believed to be a plain chocolate-chip cookie and realized that it contained peanut butter.

He soon began to have trouble breathing, so he asked a friend to drive him to the hospital. During the trip, he suffered cardiopulmonary arrest and lost consciousness, according to the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner. Doctors at the local emergency room got his heart beating again, but oxygen deprivation had already caused the brain damage that ultimately led to Jaime’s death.

Casey Ryan, a 29-year-old from California, died just 3 days later, under remarkably similar circumstances.

Ryan had been diagnosed with a severe peanut allergy and consistently took care to avoid exposure. He somehow ate food that had been cooked in peanut oil and soon began struggling to breath.

His heart stopped beating on 2 separate occasions, and he suffered brain damage due to lack of oxygen. Doctors put him in a coma for about a week in hopes of restoring brain function, but when they brought Ryan out of the coma, he proved unable to breathe on his own.

The last of the 4 victims, Edward Horan II, died just a week after Ryan. Horan, a 29-year-old television news producer, was vacationing in Vermont when he suffered his fatal attack.

A police report of the incident says that Horan’s parents told authorities that he had been diagnosed with a severe food allergy and that exposure to that food had triggered fatal anaphylaxis. However, according to the Associated Press, the report did not specify what Horan was allergic to or how he had come into contact with it.

The reaction, however, was undoubtedly severe. He died on the scene, just minutes after the initial exposure.